Lorikeet raises extra $14m for complex AI customer agent that handles ‘high-stakes’ interactions

The valuation of a Sydney-founded AI customer agent startup has more than tripled to $100 million since October 2024 as Lorikeet secures an extra $14 million in pre-Series A funding to further its proprietary "intelligent graph" technology and accelerate go-to-market initiatives.

Lorikeet's latest funding round was supported by Blackbird and existing investors Square Peg and Skip Capital, following breakout growth after its $5 million raise last year which also was backed by  Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar’s Skip Capital.

Don't be fooled by the name - Lorikeet's AI agent is not your run-of-the-mill chatbot that merely parrots back basic FAQs and fails to understand the slightest hint of complexity.  

The company claims that customer experience as we know it is broken, with support teams scattered across time zones and struggling with "sky-high turnover rates" while customers wait hours or days for help. 

Lorikeet was founded on the premise that basic AI chatbots have failed to fix this problem as they're too rigid to handle anything beyond simple FAQ responses. Even highly funded Silicon Valley darling startups have failed to ship products that can reliably handle complex support cases. 

"We're not satisfied with using AI to simply summarise FAQs, or implementing architectures passed on by OpenAI," said Lorikeet CEO Steve Hind, who co-founded the company with Jamie Hall.

"Our intelligent graph architecture is purpose-built ground up to enable AI agents to reliably handle complex workflows  in highly regulated industries that were previously impossible for AI to handle."

"What sets Lorikeet apart is our fundamental understanding that effective customer support requires more than just conversational AI," adds Hall. 

Lorikeet's intelligent graph technology orchestrates sophisticated workflows for tasks ranging from secure credit card replacements to the effective triage of medical issues and cryptocurrency transaction verification, solving multi-conditional problems and engaging in highly sensitive or regulated topics.

In an AI world rife with hallucinations from probabilistic model outcomes, Lorikeet's AI agents are designed to recognise what they don't know in order to avoid giving incorrect answers. 

Since its October raise the group has attracted several unicorns and public companies in the US and Australia as customers and pilot partners, including telehealth company Eucalyptus, Step in banking, and MagicEden in cryptocurrency.

With the help of Lorikeet's offering, Eucalyptus increased customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) by 10 points while doubling support volume in a year without growing the team. Meanwhile, NFT hub MagicEden adopted Lorikeet's technology to handle a surge of volume from a  cryptocurrency bull market and its CSAT rose from 45 per cent to 75 per cent. 

"The Australian technology ecosystem continues to produce world-class innovations in artificial intelligence, and Lorikeet stands out as a prime example," says Blackbird partner Tom Humphrey.

"The team's product approach to solving complex customer support challenges through advanced AI workflows is differentiated. Support is perhaps the highest impact and lowest hanging fruit opportunity for enterprise adoption of AI, and the market scale is absolutely enormous."

The company has plans to aggressively expand into the United States while also growing its local team in Sydney. In addition to enhancing its technology and rolling out into key industries such as healthcare, financial services, technology, and more, the funds will also be used to expand Lorikeet's enterprise capabilities.