Staircase AI Raises $4 Million for Relationship Intelligence Platform

Staircase AI has announced the completion of a $4 million seed round that will allow the company to create Staircase Relationship Intelligence (SRI), which enables companies to generate annual recurring revenue (ARR) and upsell opportunities through relationship monitoring. 

Staircase AI is a leader in relationship intelligence, and the company received funding from early-stage VC Disruptive AI, which specializes in artificial intelligence. It also received funding from StageOne Ventures, a VC fund that works to solve large enterprise challenges. 

Ori Entis is co-founder and CEO of Staircase AI.

“We are very excited that Disruptive AI and StageOne Ventures have placed their confidence in Staircase AI,” said Entis. “Only an AI-based system that fuses and analyzes large amounts of customer data can provide the deep insights needed to help companies better understand, retain and grow their customers. This investment will help us scale our engineering and accelerate our go-to-market plans.”

Analyzing Engagements

Through the use of machine learning, Staircase AI analyzes thousands of digital engagements between companies and their customers. Operating 24/7, it helps customer service teams detect anomalies and trends. 

It also provides predictions and recommendations, as well as identifies whether someone is putting the entire account at risk. In this case, Staircase AI alerts team members to the change and directs them to move forward. This helps customer service leaders understand how to adjust their approaches, which is only possible through advanced data science capabilities. 

The Start of Staircase AI 

Founded by Entis and Lior Harel, the company is based in the US with an R&D team in Israel. Entis was originally responsible for managing a customer service team that was generating over a hundred million dollars in ARR before he realized he needed to better understand the health of the client relationship and the relationships his team members had with each other.

Entis then began to read existing correspondence before determining which accounts were stable and which were at-risk. Working with Harel, the team developed a natural language processing (NLP) AI tool that could scale hundreds of thousands of messages before automatically analyzing correspondence. These included sentiment, engagement, and conversation topics from any channel.

Yorai Fainmesser is General Partner at Disruptive AI. 

“It is the magic of AI to disrupt the Customer Success paradigm – with superhuman capabilities over millions of data points, relationships could be managed greatly”, said Fainmesser. “Staircase AI can help enterprises ramp up their relationships in a click, scale their ability to assess a customer, and drive annual recurring revenue to record levels.”

Yuval Cohen is Managing Partner at StageOne Ventures. 

“Customer Success teams struggle with complex, many-to-many relationships with their clients, and lacking intelligent analytics tools, they have been unable to effectively nurture and expand their relationship to the full potential,” said Cohen. “Through relationship intelligence powered by Staircase AI, companies can determine whether they are ready to upgrade their service, maintain their existing service level, or are at churn risk.”