Astound

The company launched in early 2018 with $11.5 million in Series A funding, co-led by Vertex Ventures and Pelion Venture Partners, with participation from The Hive, Slack Fund, and Moment Ventures. This was followed by a $15.5 million Series B round in April 2019, led by March Capital Partners, bringing the total capital raised to $27 million. These funds were earmarked for accelerating innovation and talent acquisition.

Astound's core business revolves around its AI platform that uses machine learning and natural language processing to automate the entire lifecycle of employee service requests. It serves large enterprise clients, aiming to resolve common support issues such as password resets, application configurations, and network outages without human intervention. The platform is designed to add a layer of intelligence to existing service management systems like ServiceNow, Workday, and Atlassian's Jira, rather than replacing them. Revenue is generated through this software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

The platform's key features include virtual support agents for automating routine tasks and contextual recommendations to assist human agents, making them more efficient. It promises to significantly reduce call volume, decrease mean time to resolution, and lower the cost per ticket. By automating up to 70% of routine requests, the system allows IT and HR professionals to focus on more complex, high-value concerns. The technology is capable of finding answers across various enterprise data sources, including emails, databases, and spreadsheets, to provide accurate solutions.