As a product manager for the IA Talkdesk customer service startup, Charayna “CK” Kannan said that companies often say that they wanted to automate different workflows, but that it is really difficult to implement AI. Companies treats clumsy and inherited software, which often has no APIs, creating an intimidating task that their IT services did not favor.
“Each company to which we have spoken had 50 to 1,000 automation requests of different teams in its backwards to which they have never reached,” Kannan (photo above to the right) told Techcrunch. “It just doesn’t make sense. Nowadays, you should not have an automation backwards of 1,000 line items. You should be able to do it very quickly.
This achievement has become the impetus behind the new Kannan startup Pink fishWho helps business customers create AI agents and other workflows focused on AI via natural language prompts. The software has more than 200 integrations, such as Salesforce and Zendesk, and focuses on deterministic execution, which means that the same user invites the same result each time.
Kannan said Pinkfish had tried a different approach from that of competitors when selling businesses. Instead of presenting its platform as a gold ticket to automate each workflow, Pinkfish tells companies to try the software just to automate one or two different workflows at the start. “So that’s where they start, then go from two to four, from four to 10, from 10 to 20, and I hope 1,000 [automations through Pinkfish]”She said.
So far, this strategy has borne fruit. Pinkfish was launched in stealth in January 2024 with Kannan as CEO and co-founder Ben Rigby as Director of Products and Technologies (CPTO). The company focuses on a few areas, including retail and services, and has won hundreds of users and business customers, including Ipsy, Elevate and Talkdesk, among others.
Kannan said that, although many workflow automation startups are looking to help companies cut some of the most “additional” aspects of a job such as market studies or draw potential prospects , Pinkfish focuses on critical workflows.
She gave the example of Ipsy, a makeup subscription service. One of the first Ipsy workflows used Pinkfish to automate was its price request function, which was previously taken care of by a team of three people. This team should respond manually to each request, whether it has arrived during the night or the weekend. Kannan now said that this whole process crosses Pinkfish.
“It’s so critical of the mission,” said Kannan. “If Pinkfish is getting somewhere, guess what, your prices are not on your website. You leave money on the table. “”
Now Pinkfish has told Techcrunch exclusively that he emerges from stealth and had collected a pre-agreed tour of $ 7.6 million led by Norwest Venture Partners with the participation of Storm Ventures and providential investors.
Scott Beechuk, Norwest partner who would take a seat in Pinkfish, told Techcrunch that he had known Kannan since his time in Talkdesk and that Kannan would operate Kannan for various Norwest portfolio companies.
Beechuk told Techcrunch that he was delighted to support the company because he thinks that Kannan and Rigby have the right balance of understanding underlying technology and understanding customers to stand out in an agent landscape of crowded.
“They are launching with a lot of important logos and paid customers who find a real return on investment, you support these seeds of seeds, they could take years to deliver a real return on investment,” said Beechuk.
Kannan also thinks that Pinkfish stands out from competitors because it allows customers to use natural language to encourage the system while using complete code in the background to build these IA workflows. She said that even if the low code was popular for years, and is still for some of their competitors, she thinks that in today’s environment, it becomes too limiting and is indeed “dead”.
She added that companies do not want to choose from a set of pre-coded construction blocks, but would rather have a solution that gives them access to a full code back-end but with a simpler interface for use. While the AI ​​agents market becomes more and more crowded, it hopes that the message resonate.
“How can we go and bring tangible value to critical and complex use cases?” Based it with the agent and determinism, and by bringing a single platform with the good level of railing for all these connections, “said Kannan. “I think these are the two areas that we think differently.”
