What happens when a couple of serial entrepreneurs decide they’re done duct-taping legacy CRMs to modern customer expectations? You get Kustomer, a company that didn’t just see the cracks in the system but built a whole new foundation and handed the trowel to AI.
Founded in 2015 by Brad Birnbaum and Jeremy Suriel, the duo who previously sold Assistly to Salesforce and watched it morph into Desk.com, Kustomer was born from firsthand frustration. Tickets were king, context was missing, and support teams were operating like short-order cooks slinging half-baked solutions. Brad and Jeremy didn’t want a better ticketing system. They wanted a CRM that thought like a human and moved like an API.
Fast-forward to today. Kustomer just pulled in a fresh $30 million Series B, led by Norwest Venture Partners, with repeat believers Battery Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Boldstart Ventures back in the mix. This isn’t just a cap table glow-up, it’s validation that even in a market where SaaS isn’t the shiny new toy anymore, deep tech with real impact still commands attention.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t some bolt-on chatbot circus. Kustomer is an AI-native platform, built from scratch to handle the full customer lifecycle. We’re talking real-time ingestion, intelligent agents for both reps and customers, and automation that actually works instead of causing more work. One timeline, omnichannel everything, no Frankenstein mess of disconnected tools. The system thinks in context. It doesn’t ask the same question twice. It doesn’t forget you’re human.
Numbers don’t lie. Over 10,000 customers, including Priceline, Reformation, and HexClad. AI Agents that boost rep productivity by over 30% and autonomously resolve up to 40% of support volume. Revenue might have dipped in 2023, but the direction of travel is clear: tighter, leaner, more surgical execution.
This round fuels a global push. Regional data centers. Deeper integrations. Embedded analytics. Proactive AI that doesn’t just respond, it initiates. The product roadmap reads like a manifesto for modern support, and the team behind it isn’t checking boxes. They’re redrawing them.
Credit to the executive lineup that’s pushing this evolution: Anna Fisher, Douglas Hanna, Tanya Livingstone, Lauren Gold, Andrew Bothwell, Mike Chapin, Rachel Hughes. A crew stacked with enterprise muscle, AI vision, and just enough try-me energy to wake up the sleepiest corner of the CX stack.
Brad Birnbaum and Jeremy Suriel aren’t chasing trends. They’re building a category around intelligence, not automation for automation’s sake. The message is simple: stop managing tickets, start understanding people. And now, with Norwest and crew in the passenger seat, Kustomer’s not just staying in the game, they’re changing how it’s played.
