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AI Customer Service Agents Are Eating the Call Center
A pack of well-funded startups - Decagon, Ada, Uniphore, Omilia - plus Amazon, Kore.ai, Capacity and Five9 are teaching software to resolve support tickets end to end. The prize is a customer service market worth hundreds of billions, and the humans who used to answer the phone.
Verloop Spent a Decade on the Chat Window. Nurix Just Bought It
The Bengaluru company built its business on automating customer support one message at a time, handling more than 20 million conversations a month. In July 2026, Mukesh Bansal's Nurix AI bought it - just as the category it helped pioneer turned into a multi-billion-dollar race.
Jesse Zhang
Jesse Zhang is the 28-year-old co-founder and CEO of Decagon, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI company valued at $4.5 billion that builds autonomous AI agents for customer service. A Harvard Computer Science graduate who sold his first startup Lowkey to Niantic, Zhang pivoted to enterprise AI in 2023 when GPT-4 arrived, spending months in customer discovery interviews before writing a single line of code. In under two years, he scaled Decagon from stealth to unicorn status, raised $481M total, landed clients like Duolingo, Notion, Hertz, and Deutsche Telekom, and made Forbes 30 Under 30. He is also a Grandmaster-ranked Teamfight Tactics player, a competition math problem author, and an angel investor in 20+ startups.
Cole Pergament
Cole Pergament is a Partner on Sequoia Capital's growth team, one of the most storied venture platforms in Silicon Valley. A Wharton summa cum laude graduate who founded his university's undergraduate fintech group, Cole cut his teeth at Morgan Stanley's Global Technology Group before spending four years at BOND Capital, where he backed companies that became household names in AI and enterprise software - including OpenAI, Decagon, AlphaSense, Weights & Biases, and Wiz. He joined Sequoia in July 2025, bringing a reputation for seeking founders who embrace discomfort, question convention, and are fully committed to their vision.