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Cape Town-based customer service startup Cue has raised $5 million in a primary funding round co-led by South African venture capital firm Knife Capital and FAM Investments. The capital will be deployed toward building out Cue’s next-generation AI agents, expanding into new international markets, and deepening investment in voice, security and enterprise integrations, according to the company.
The round comes as businesses increasingly turn to autonomous AI to resolve customer queries without human intervention.
Cue said the fresh capital will fund three priorities: engineering its next wave of autonomous AI agents alongside deeper voice infrastructure and stronger security; scaling sales and marketing across the UK and South Africa as it pushes into new verticals and international markets; and product development spanning more channels, additional agent actions, deeper integrations and advanced analytics.
“Our growth strategy reflects exactly what our clients are asking for: an all-in-one AI-powered customer service platform that delivers value and best-in-class service across every channel,” said Richard Nischk, co-founder and CEO of Cue.
Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Cape Town, Cue is an AI-powered customer service platform building autonomous agents that resolve customer issues end-to-end across WhatsApp, webchat, email, Messenger, USSD, SMS and voice. The company, whose remote teams are spread across cities including Lisbon, Johannesburg, Manchester, Bloemfontein, Helsinki, Gqeberha and Delhi, now has more than 40 staff across 10 cities in five countries.
Cue already powers customer conversations for more than 500 companies across the UK and South Africa, spanning the automotive, retail, insurance, finance and education sectors. The company grew annual recurring revenue by more than 160% year-on-year in its latest financial year, and its platform now handles more than 500 million messages and conversations annually.
Keet van Zyl, Founding Partner at Knife Capital, said, “Customer service remains the lifeblood of every enduring business. As AI reshapes enterprise software, the winners will be companies that enhance human capability rather than replace it. Cue has built a platform that delivers measurable value today, led by a team with the vision, technical depth and execution ability to be a category leader. That’s exactly the type of business Knife Capital looks to back.”
Cue is positioning itself against decades of fragmented customer service technology, where businesses built up separate systems for voice, email, messaging and social media, often forcing customers to repeat themselves as service teams juggled disconnected tools. The company’s approach is to combine autonomous agents and human teams on one platform.
The company claims that its first-generation agents already resolve more than 60% of customer conversations autonomously. The next iteration is designed to securely execute more complex, cross-system tasks such as qualifying leads and adding them to CRMs, checking order status, booking appointments, handling student applications and sending payment links.
When a conversation still requires a human, the platform hands it over to Cue’s unified inbox and ticketing desk with full context attached.
“It’s an exciting time of transformation for the company,” Nischk said. “We’re at an inflection point for AI in customer service, and we see more businesses starting to realise that they need a unified platform to succeed, not a patchwork of point solutions.”
Nischk said the shift is being driven by pressure on both sides of the support relationship. “Rising costs have put support teams under pressure to do more with less. At the same time, consumers want self-service but are increasingly frustrated by poor automated experiences. Our goal is to help businesses deliver a genuinely great automated experience, while also recognising that escalating to a human is often the right thing to do,” he added.
