Clerk Chat founded by Alexander Haque, Igor Boshoer, and Will Chertoff, raised $7M in seed funding last month (October). Led by Race Capital with participation from HF0, Mento VC, and Altair VC.

They enable AI agents across messaging channels that work on behalf of their customers’ businesses for support, sales and marketing.

As you’ll understand, they’re creating an interesting category, and we invite you to suggest your label for their category in the comments. AI Communications is the obvious one, but they are doing all the backend hard work to make it easy for businesses. I think of it as a PaaS (platform as a service) across all you business processes. Like SFDC, but with all the backend heavy lifting done, and automated with LLMs.

In a way it reminded me of AI startups Webio and Vida, in being a constrained problem space, so the LLMs works good enough. And applying the LLMs not only to customer / employee communications. But also heavy lifting backend processes. Its LLMs everywhere!

Before Clerk Chat Igor worked for Docusign. They had their phone number the website, but it was not possible to text that number. That gave Igor the motivation to solve that problem. Its 2023, anyone should be able to have a text conversation with a company’s main number. Its should be as easy as 2 clicks to set up.

Alex, Igor’s co-founder worked at Netflix, in the telecoms division, and understood the power of text conversations, and the barriers that stop text conversations being more widely adopted.

Clerk Chat enables companies to send and receive messages at scale, but with a human touch powered by AI. And from my perspective they have removed a number of speed bumps for businesses using messaging, including SMS.

To do that they use LLMs to do the 10DLC registration, they automate the LOA (Letter of Authorization), they integrate across Microsoft, SFDC, compliance services, CPaaS like Telnyx, etc. This integration and automation layer is where the secret sauce is being built, hence raising $7M seed round in today’s market, belies a much bigger plan. And why AI communications does not capture the category Clerk Chat are building.

By leveraging AI-powered SMS solutions, Clerk Chat provides businesses with the ability to automate, personalize, and scale their customer and employee outreach in a compliant, secure, and conversational manner for sales, support and marketing use cases.

There is no need to get a new business phone number. Clerk Chat enables businesses to turn any existing phone number into a dynamic conversational messaging platform, enabling seamless communication. I have to say this again, its 2024 and it’s still a pain. Which is a shame on the whole SMS industry.

Clerk Chat integrates with and sits within MS Teams, Zoom and Webex, and makes it possible for employees to send and receive text messages from MS Teams to SMS inbox without needing a new phone number.

Their platform is deployed in 1000+ businesses across 39 industries.

We’re going to have Igor back to run through some demos, to understand how easy they make it. And have a think about the name for the category being built.