Seattle Startup Seasalt Raises $4.2m To Help Businesses Answer Customer Messages With Ai

Seasalt co-founders Guoguo Chen (left) and Xuchen Yao.

Seasalt.AI, a Seattle startup that helps businesses use AI to communicate with customers, announced a $4.2 million seed round.

The startup aims to address a pain point for businesses: missing customer inquiries via phone, text, messaging apps, websites, and more.

It offers software that can answer questions automatically via an AI agent with either voice or text. The idea is to let businesses respond quickly at any time of the day and capture potential leads.

The company has about 10,000 users and 200 paying customers, ranging from small businesses to larger enterprise clients.

Seasalt CEO Xuchen Yao told GeekWire that Seasalt sets itself apart from the flurry for AI-fueled customer call center solutions by offering both voice and text automation capabilities.

Seasalt also offers other products, including SeaX for outbound marketing communication and SeaMeet for meeting-related automation tools. It pitches those products to potential healthcare customers for communication with patients and for senior care call check-ins.

Yao and Seasalt co-founder Guoguo Chen previously sold a natural langauge startup called Kitt.ai to Baidu in 2017. They spent two years at the Chinese tech giant before launching Seasalt in 2020.

Unlock Venture Partners, which invests in startups in Seattle and Los Angeles, led the seed round. Seasalt’s other backers include Grand Vision Ventures, SparkLabs Taiwan, PatientsForce, and ZVC, which formed from a merger between LINE Ventures and YJ Capital.

“Seasalt.ai’s advanced language processing capabilities, particularly their expertise in handling mixed language (code switching) conversations, align perfectly with our mission to enhance communication services across Asia,” Hyung Kim, U.S. lead for ZVC, said in a statement. “Their voice AI has the potential to greatly enhance our voice-based experience, which could benefit tens of millions of businesses using LINE.”

GeekWire previously reported on Seasalt’s initial funding in 2022. The company has 23 employees.