Solidroad is part of the winter 2025 cohort at Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley start-up accelerator.
Irish AI start-up Solidroad has raised $6.5m in a seed funding round led by First Round Capital, with participation from Y Combinator. This brings the two-year-old start-up’s total raise to $8m.
Solidroad is a quality assurance training platform for customer experience teams. The start-up aims itself at companies that do not fully automate all of their customer interactions with artificial intelligence.
It reviews and tries to improve all customer interactions a business may have – human or AI.
Solidroad currently has more than 50 customers, including Crypto.com, workforce management SaaS platform Connecteam and the US-based telehealth clinic Fella and Delilah.
The Dublin-founded start-up recently moved headquarters to San Francisco to grow its business.
It has been snapped up by Y Combinator as part of its winter 2025 cohort of start-ups. Y Combinator is a prestigious Silicon Valley start-up accelerator that previously helped launch Stripe.
“We built Solidroad because we were tired of seeing CX [customer experience] teams treated like a cost centre and forced to duct tape together bloated, siloed tools,” wrote Mark Hughes and Patrick Finlay, the two co-founders, on a blog announcing the raise. The two were previously colleagues at Intercom.
CEO Hughes previously founded Gradguide, a coaching and mentorship network for recent college graduates, in 2019. The company raised $2m before being acquired in 2022.
While Finlay, also the start-up’s chief technology officer, previously co-founded Monaru, which helped product and marketing teams build in-app experiences.
Monaru was part of a previous cohort at the Y Combinator start-up accelerator.
The start-up is hiring “aggressively”, the founders said, with several San Francisco-based senior level roles currently open for grabs.
Last year, it raised $1.2m to scale its enterprise customer experience training platform.
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.
