As Chief Product Officer of AI customer service startup Talkdesk, Charanya “CK” Kannan said companies often want to automate different workflows, but say that implementing AI is really difficult. Companies often deal with clunky, legacy software that doesn’t have APIs, creating difficult tasks that IT departments don’t prioritize.
“Every company we spoke to had 50-1,000 automation requests from various teams in the backlog) told TechCrunch. “This means nothing. No. You should not have a backlog of 1,000 item automation on this day and age. You should be able to do it really fast.”
This realization has become the driving force behind Pinkfish, a new startup in Cannan. This allows enterprise customers to build AI agents and other AI-driven workflows through natural language prompts. The software has over 200 integrations, including Salesforce and Zendesk, and focuses on deterministic execution. This means that the same user prompt produces the same results every time.
Kannan said Pinkfish tried a different approach to selling to businesses than its competitors. Instead of pitching the platform as a golden ticket to automate all workflows, Pinkfish instructs businesses to try out the software just to automate one or two different workflows first. “That’s where they start, then they’re 2-4, 4-10, 10-20, and hopefully 1,000 (automation via pinkfish),” she said.
So far, the strategy has paid off. Pinkfish launched CEO and co-founder Ben Rigby at Stealth in January 2024 as Chief Product and Technology Head (CPTO). The company focuses on several areas, including retail and services, attracting hundreds of users and corporate customers, including IPSY, Elevate and TalkDesk.
Kannan said many workflow automation startups are trying to help businesses cut out more “extra” aspects of their work, such as automating market research and pulling in potential sales leads, but Pinkfish focuses on mission-critical workflows.
She gave an example of IPSY, a makeup subscription service. One of the first workflows was one of the first workflows used to automate pink fish. The price request feature was previously taken care of by a team of three. This team will need to manually respond to each request, whether they come overnight or on the weekend. Kannan said the entire process will be carried out through pinkfish.
“It’s very important,” Kannan said. “If the pinkfish is screwed somewhere, guess your price isn’t on your website. You’ll leave money on the table.
Now, Pinkfish has emerged from Stealth in TechCrunch and has exclusively raised a $7.6 million seed round led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from Storm Ventures and Angel Investors.
Norwest partner Scott Bichuk is planning to take a Pinkfish board sheet, and has known Kannan since he was with Talkdesk, and taps Kannan to advise various Norwest portfolio companies. He said he said that it would be.
Beechuk is excited to support the company as he believes that Kannan and Rigby have the right balance between understanding the underlying technology and distinguishing their customer base in a crowded AI agent landscape. He said he was there.
“They pay customers who find a lot of important logos and real ROIs. You can help these seed stage companies and deliver real ROIs, so it could take years to support them. There is,” says Beechuk.
Kannan also believes Pinkfish stands out from its competitors. Because customers can use natural language to encourage their systems and build these AI workflows with full code in the background. She says that low code has been popular for years and is still part of their competitors, but in today’s environment it is so restricted that it is effectively “dead.” Ta.
She added that companies don’t want to choose from a set of pre-coded building blocks, but rather have a solution that allows access to a full code backend, but has an easy-to-use interface. As the AI agent market gets more and more crowded, she hopes that the message will resonate.
“How can you bring specific value to mission-critical and complex use cases? One platform with the right level of guardrail for all these connections, grounding it to agents and determinism. By bringing in the “Kannan” said. “I think these are two areas that we think differently.”
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