In short: Solidroad, a Dublin and San Francisco startup founded by Intercom alumni, has raised $25 million in a Series A led by Hedosophia to automate customer support quality assurance using AI. The platform reviews 100% of customer interactions versus the industry standard of 1-3%, and counts Ryanair, Crypto.com, and Oura among its customers.
Solidroad, a Dublin and San Francisco-based startup that uses AI to automate quality assurance for customer support teams, has raised $25 million in a Series A round led by Hedosophia, the UK investment firm. The round follows a $6.5 million seed led by First Round Capital with participation from Y Combinator, and brings the company’s total funding to $31.5 million.
The company was founded in 2023 by Mark Hughes and Patrick Finlay, both former Intercom employees, and currently has 20 staff across its two offices. Its customers include Ryanair, Crypto.com, and Oura, alongside large outsourced contact centre operators like PartnerHero and Tech Mahindra.
The problem it solves
Most customer support operations review between 1% and 3% of their interactions for quality. A team lead listens to a handful of calls, reads a few chat transcripts, and scores them against a rubric. The process is slow, inconsistent, and statistically meaningless: reviewing 2% of conversations tells you almost nothing about the other 98%.
Solidroad automates this by applying AI-powered quality assurance to 100% of customer interactions, across voice, chat, and email. The platform scores every conversation against the company’s quality criteria, identifies patterns in agent performance, flags coaching opportunities, and generates the kind of comprehensive view that manual review cannot provide at any practical scale.
The pitch is not that AI should replace customer support agents, a proposition that companies like Wonderful AI (which raised $150 million at a $2 billion valuation in March) are pursuing more aggressively. Solidroad’s position is that human agents are not going away, and the ones who remain need better training, better feedback, and better quality oversight than the current manual approach delivers.
The Intercom connection
Hughes and Finlay’s background at Intercom is not incidental. Intercom is one of the companies that defined the modern customer support software category, and its alumni network has produced a cluster of startups building tools for support teams. The founders’ experience gives them both domain credibility and a network of potential customers who understand the pain points Solidroad is addressing.
The seed round’s angel investors reflect that network: Intercom co-founder Ciaran Lee, Wayflyer co-founder Jack Pierce, Voxpro co-founder Dan Kiely, CPL founder Anne Heraty, and former PayPal executive Louise Phelan. The Series A lead, Hedosophia, is best known for its SPAC partnerships with companies like Cazoo and Paysafe, but has been increasingly active in enterprise AI investments.
Solidroad joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 cohort, which gave the company the Silicon Valley distribution channel that Irish startups often struggle to access from Dublin. The combination of YC credentials, First Round Capital backing, and Intercom lineage has given a 20-person company access to enterprise customers that would normally be out of reach at this stage.
What the numbers show
Solidroad says Crypto.com improved its go-live customer satisfaction score by three percentage points after deploying the platform, with CSAT now above 90%. At PartnerHero and Tech Mahindra, two of the world’s largest outsourced contact centres, onboarding times for new agents dropped by 50%. These are the kinds of metrics that contact centre operators, who run on tight margins and high turnover, respond to.
The company holds SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications, which are table stakes for selling into enterprise contact centres but remain a meaningful barrier for early-stage startups. Getting certified at 20 employees suggests the founders prioritised enterprise readiness from the beginning, a decision that trades speed for credibility with the large BPO operators who represent the biggest potential contracts.
Market context
AI customer support is one of the most active categories in enterprise software. AI chatbots now handle roughly 65% of customer service interactions, up from around 30% three years ago, and every major platform is building AI features into its support tools. But the QA layer, the part that ensures quality whether the agent is human or AI, has received less attention and less funding.
That is beginning to change. As AI handles more frontline interactions, the need to monitor, evaluate, and improve those interactions scales proportionally. A chatbot that resolves 65% of tickets is only as good as the quality assurance system that catches the cases it handles poorly. Solidroad’s bet is that automated QA becomes more valuable, not less, as AI takes over more of the customer-facing workload.
The competitive landscape includes both point solutions and platform players. Established companies like NICE, Verint, and Genesys offer QA modules within broader contact centre suites. Newer entrants like MaestroQA and Klaus (acquired by Zendesk) have built dedicated QA products. Solidroad’s differentiation is its focus on AI-native QA that covers 100% of interactions by default rather than sampling, combined with training and coaching tools that close the loop between quality measurement and agent improvement.
The Dublin angle
Solidroad operates from both San Francisco and Dublin, with the company maintaining a five-day in-person presence at both locations. Dublin has a deep concentration of customer support operations, with major tech companies and BPOs running European support centres from the city. For a company selling into the contact centre industry, having engineering talent in Dublin and sales presence in San Francisco is a sensible split that plays to both ecosystems’ strengths.
At $25 million, the round is modest compared to the headline numbers dominating AI funding. Q1 2026 saw $300 billion in global venture investment, with AI accounting for roughly $242 billion of the total. But not every AI company needs to raise at a billion-dollar valuation to build a viable business. Contact centre QA is a defined market with clear buyers, measurable ROI, and the kind of recurring revenue dynamics that enterprise investors understand. Solidroad’s task is to capture enough of that market before the platform vendors build comparable features into the tools their customers already use.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
