Forethought Series-B

This is the Forethought pitch deck to raise a $17m series-b round in 2020.

About

Forethought is an AI company that creates order, removes redundant work, and provides efficiency for businesses everywhere. In its first platform, Forethought is supercharging customer support organizations with a powerful natural language understanding platform called Agatha. Agatha is an AI-powered customer support agent who immediately responds to customers to resolve their issues, automates many of the repetitive tasks agents spend valuable time doing and provides real-time assistance and insights to agents and managers as they work to resolve issues more efficiently. We’ve raised accuracy in finding solutions, pulling backlogs, and automating responses for many in the enterprise with our products Solve, Triage, and Assist. We’re changing the way enterprises access, share, and leverage knowledge.

The company was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

In total, Forethought raised $17 million in a Series B round from Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, NEA, Operator Collective, and others, alongside Sean “Diddy” Combs, LL Cool J, and Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith.

The deal came together entirely over videoconferencing during the pandemic, Nicholas said.

In a press release, actor and Grammy Award-winning artist LL Cool J said he was impressed by the founder’s track record.

“My decision to invest in this company is driven by my belief in this business,” he wrote, “but I certainly also hope it helps to raise awareness of the kinds of contributions young Black entrepreneurs are making in technology as well.”

Forethought’s business is booming

The company’s chatbot, Agatha, uses machine learning and natural-language processing to answer support tickets, patch customers through to a human if needed, and give agents the power of Google autocomplete at the help desk. The startup said it’s closed more than 500,000 support tickets for customers like Carta, Gusto, and Thumbtack.

Tools that use artificial intelligence — once relegated to academic studies and science fiction — are being deployed in every industry, and they’re drawing tech investors in droves. Insiders say the the coronavirus pandemic has even sped up the adoption of these technologies as businesses, grappling with remote workforces and shrinking budgets, look for ways to run their operations more efficiently, Business Insider’s Benjamin Pimentel and Paayal Zaveri write.

The crisis created new business for Forethought. Businesses that sent their customer support agents home, where they didn’t have access to their usual tools, turned to AI to help them be more effective, Nicholas said. And some customers saw the volume of customer support issues increase as much as 5X as their customers faced uncertainty.

This year, Forethought’s staff tripled to 48 people, as other startups had to cut jobs in order to stretch their budgets.

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