Maven AGI is on a mission to reimagine enterprise customer experience, starting with support.
Jonathan Corbin, Founder & CEO, shares the details of Maven AGI, and what it’s like to work there.
We discuss:
- Details on Maven AGI
- Customer Examples
- How they are changing the customer experience
- The latest with Maven AGI
- Company Growth
- Why Maven AGI should be on the radar for job seekers
Video Transcript
I have formatted the transcript for readability, incorporating the speaker’s name and company name, and ensuring no bold formatting or headers are added.
Jonathan, thanks so much for joining us.
Great to be here, Keith.
I’m excited to talk to you because it’s been about a year since we had our podcast interview, and ultimately, there’s been so much going on at Maven AGI over the past year.
Let’s talk about Maven AGI and what the company does. Maven is creating AI agents for customer experience. For most people, we start with customer support.
The challenge that we’re trying to solve is that a lot of people have massive numbers of customers who are coming to them and saying, “I need help with using your product and getting value out of it.” But for many companies, because every single interaction is expensive (the average is $40 to $60 per interaction), they’re saying, “How do I deflect as many of these interactions as possible so it doesn’t cost me as much?”
At Maven, we’re allowing people to be able to interact with AI agents who:
- Know all of the knowledge about the products.
- Have context around historic interactions.
- Have the ability to be able to take actions.
We are creating AI agents for customer experience that are answering over 93% of customer inquiries with no humans involved. That’s pretty amazing.
What’s a good example of a customer using your platform?
We have some really great customers. One that I really like is a company called ClickUp. They built a very complex product, and they said, “It’s challenging to be able to support this. Our average support rep has to go through nine months of training in order to be able to use this product.” We said we think we’re up for the challenge.
They actually started working with us using just a co-pilot alone. What that means is you have a human agent sitting there, maybe using their Zendesk, and when the customer’s questions come into them, we are creating something on the right-hand side that says, “Here’s the sentiment of the user. Here’s the question that they’re asking. Here’s the answer to it. Click here and you’re on to the next one.”
What they saw with just using that co-pilot alone was a 30% improvement in terms of agent performance. Their agents were able to answer 30% more questions on a daily basis.
We’ve actually continued to expand beyond just co-pilot with many of our customers. We have some really cool customers like the company called Invicti here in Boston, which is a security company. Security is a tough one; there are so many nuances to it. We’re answering over 97% of their customers’ inquiries where they’re interacting with Maven through chat agents, through email, through a whole bunch of different mechanisms. We have over 50 customers who are working with us today across a broad array of different areas, including the B2B space and FinTech.
When I first heard of what you and your co-founders were building, I was like, “This is the perfect use case for a native AI company.” That’s really been your journey—you are totally disrupting what used to be done.
I think that’s the reason why you leave some of those legacy companies. You see the opportunity in front of us. My co-founders and I were fortunate to be in really great companies (HubSpot, Stripe, and Google), but what we saw was that there was an opportunity for us to really change the way that people are interacting and engaging with their customers. We could do that in a very personalized manner that’s bespoke to every single customer, with full understanding of:
- What are the products that they purchase?
- What is the context that makes the interactions relevant for them?
- What are the historic interactions?
And then the ability to be able to move beyond just answering questions into being able to take actions on their behalf.
A really good example of that would be a bank that we’re working with. They would have customers coming to them and saying things like, “Where’s my money?” With Maven, they were able to say, “Okay great. We know who you are. We know the products that you have access to. We know that you have a bank account and a checking account. We can look at those historic interactions. We can identify, ‘Oh, you’re probably talking about the deposit that you made two days ago. Your money is going to be available in another two days because that’s how long it takes us to process a deposit.'”
Those are the types of things that create a delightful customer experience. In fact, what we’re seeing with our customers is they’re able to deliver a 95% plus CSAT score using Maven, which is pretty amazing.
As I indicated in my intro, there’s been a lot that has been happening at Maven AGI. Let’s bring our audience up to speed on the new round of funding and anything else.
We were really fortunate. Funding is the byproduct of having amazing customers. We did a $50 million Series B, led by folks like Dell, with participation from Schneider, Cisco, Lux, E14, and M13—some really amazing investors.
The area of focus for us was great, as that allows us to be able to make sure that we’re bringing Maven to so many more people. We tried to really kind of think deeply about the use of different funding rounds as it pertained to where we were as a company.
The life cycle of a startup:
- You start off trying to prove out product-market fit—that you’re solving a real problem and people are willing to pay you for it.
- Once you’ve done that, the next thing you need to do is get to distribution as fast as possible.
The challenge is that for most companies, you’re constantly kind of teetering on “I don’t want to overextend myself.” We said, “How do we get to that massive distribution as fast as possible?” Turns out that there are some amazing partners out there that we were able to bring in as part of our last round of funding. We are excited to lean into building out our partner ecosystem, and you’ll be hearing more about that later this year.
In terms of growing the team, we’re about 85 people right now. We have a really nice contingent of folks here in Austin, and then we have our field employees and some of our more senior engineers that are remote. We’ve been hiring like crazy over the past couple of months—I think we’ve brought in about 16 people over the last four months.
Once someone joins the team, what’s the culture like at Maven AGI?
I think it’s a culture that has a lot of excitement in it. When we started Maven, we actually wanted to be very intentional about the culture that we were creating. The focus was how do we create a place where people can do their best work. We believe that everyone wants to be able to do great work, and the challenge for most people is that a lot of times it’s not enabled. We wanted to be very intentional about creating that culture, and culture is the byproduct of the intentionality as well as the people that you bring in.
Top tier talent always has different options available for them. Why is now the ideal time to join Maven AGI?
It’s a great question. We’re solving one of the most interesting problems using technology that’s still being invented. If you want to work on really interesting, challenging problems and continue to evolve the way that Gen AI is being deployed and being used, Maven is a great place to do that.
If you are interested in exploring opportunities at Maven AGI, you need to go to their company page on VentureFizz, which has all their job listings there. Go to venturefizz.com/mavenagi and you’ll see all their listings.
Jonathan, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the great details about the company.
Appreciate it, Keith. Great to see you again.
