Hiring has already begun and will continue in the ‘coming months’, founder Mark Hughes tells SiliconRepublic.com.
Ireland-based IY Combinator Solidroad has announced a $25m Series A round led by UK investment firm Hedosophia.
The San Francisco-headquartered startup offers companies an AI-powered quality assurance and training platform that reviews customer interactions for improvement points. This data may also be used to create training simulations.
“Companies handle hundreds of thousands of customer interactions every day, but most can’t tell how well those interactions are going. Metrics like response times or ticket volumes don’t capture the true quality of the transaction,” founder and CEO Mark Hughes told SiliconRepublic.com.
As AI takes over mundane applications, the increasingly complex conversations that reach humans tend to be complex and emotionally charged, Hughes notes. This raises the bar required of human agents, putting pressure on training.
“We provide an independent quality layer for all customer interactions, so companies can consistently assess performance against their standards.”
The new funding, along with a $6.5m seed round in June last year, will help the startup grow its teams in Dublin and San Francisco.
“We’re very focused on scaling up … to meet a clear change in the market,” Hughes said. Solidroad currently employs 20 people. The next wave of recruitment has begun and will continue in the “coming months”.
“As demand grows from businesses seeking better visibility and control of customer interactions led by humans and AI, expanding our team is critical to meeting that demand and continuing to raise the bar for quality across the industry,” said the CEO.
By 2025, the then two-year-old said it would have about 50 customers, a number that has grown “by a ton”, according to the CEO. Solidroad works with the likes of Crypto.com, Ryanair and Oura.
“Across our clients, we typically see a 20pc increase in quality assurance submissions and a 90pc reduction in manual review time,” says Hughes.
Hughes previously founded Gradguide, a mentoring and mentoring network for college graduates, in 2019. The company raised $2m before it was acquired in 2022. Co-founder Patrick Finlay previously co-founded Monaru, which helped product teams and marketers build in-app experiences.
Solidroad, founded by the duo in 2023, joined the Y Combinator accelerator as part of its winter 2025 cohort. Finlay’s previous business was part of a previous accelerator program.
Hughes said his biggest lesson as a founder was “learning the difference between a product that people find interesting and one that they really need”.
Of his experience at Y Combinator, he said: “I quickly learned to distinguish between what is going to have an impact versus what is just a trend.”
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