Staircase AI Raises $4 Million in Seed Round to Create B2B Relationship Intelligence Platform

Los Angeles, CA, Staircase AI, a pioneer in relationship intelligence,  announced the completion of its $4 million seed round today. The company received funding  from Disruptive AI, an early-stage VC that specializes in artificial intelligence (AI) and StageOne Ventures, a VC fund focused on solving large enterprise challenges. 

“We are very excited that StageOne Ventures and Disruptive AI have placed their confidence in  Staircase AI,” said Ori Entis, co-founder and CEO of Staircase AI. “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.” 

Staircase AI uses advanced machine learning to analyze thousands of digital engagements between companies and their existing customers. It runs 24x7 to provide Customer Success (CS) teams the peace of mind knowing that it will detect anomalies and trends while providing  predictions and recommendations. The system identifies whether a champion or decision maker is putting the entire account at risk. Staircase AI will alert team members to the change,  and direct them to move forward. CS leaders are trying to understand how to quickly adjust their playbooks. Without advanced data science capabilities, this is impossible.  

The company was founded by Ori Entis and Lior Harel and is based in the US with an R&D team in Israel. While managing a CS team responsible for generating over a hundred million dollars in annual recurring revenue, Entis realized he lacked visibility into both the health of the client relationship and into the relationships his team members had with their counterparts. 

To improve his understanding of customer status and team performance, Entis began reading  through existing correspondence and was quickly able to determine which accounts were on  solid ground and which were at-risk. He worked with Harel to develop a natural language processing AI tool that could scale across hundreds of thousands of messages and automatically analyze correspondence, including sentiment, engagement, and conversation topics, from any channel. 

“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 Yorai Fainmesser, General Partner at Disruptive AI. “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.”  

“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 Yuval Cohen, Managing Partner at StageOne Ventures. “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.” 

Staircase Relationship Intelligence (SRI) will set the bar for AI-driven customer analytics that help customer success managers gain insight into their teams’ activities. 

About Staircase AI 

Staircase AI believes that building strong, authentic relationships with customers is the best  way to drive customer growth and retention. The company’s mission is to help monitor, scale,  and develop these essential relationships. Staircase AI’s predictive data processing and AI-based  technology analyzes thousands of real-time client-vendor engagements, enabling CS teams to  make the crucial shift from reactive to proactive. 

Staircase AI was founded in 2021 and the company has offices in Los Angeles and Tel-Aviv. 

About StageOne Ventures 

StageOne Ventures provides financing and professional guidance to early-stage companies to  help build exceptional enterprises. StageOne leads investments in Israel-related early-stage  start-ups focused on solving large enterprise challenges utilizing transformative deep  technologies. The fund is committed to providing its portfolio companies with top value creation through the technological and financial strength of its team, by building powerful  partnerships that propel seed-stage entrepreneurs forward, from the initial innovation concept through additional quality rounds of funding to market leadership and impact.

About Disruptive AI 

Disruptive AI (DAI) is the first Israeli venture capital specialized in Artificial Intelligence startups from their early-stages and acts as a home for the Israeli AI innovation community. DAI is partnering with top Israeli entrepreneurs who bring industry domain expertise and strong AI  technology vision to build large, meaningful companies and impactful global brands. The Fund is backed by more than 30 active top leading entrepreneurs from the Israeli hi-tech arena and  strategically involved with global corporations who marked AI as their focus.