In a move set to transform how software companies handle customer-reported issues, Waypoint AI has announced a $3.1 million pre-seed funding round led by 42CAP and Dreamcraft Ventures. Backed by Berkeley SkyDeck Fund and Lumiere AI Ventures, this early-stage capital supports the growth of Waypoint’s AI Customer Support Engineer, a new automation solution built to take the pain out of escalation management.
Founded in 2024 by Tomas Polivka, Steve Boogar, and Liam Boogar-Azoulay, Waypoint AI is addressing one of the most expensive and time-consuming cross-functional challenges in software organizations: technical escalations. From intake to postmortem, the startup’s intelligent support engineer handles everything in between, cutting down resolution times while freeing engineering teams from reactive troubleshooting.
Solving Escalation Bottlenecks in Software Support
In high-growth SaaS and enterprise software environments, engineering teams lose as much as 15% of their time on escalations from customer support. These are not support tickets—these are product defects, mission-critical bugs, and chronic user pain points that involve cross-functional effort. Waypoint AI comes in as a smarter layer between support and engineering, leveraging its proprietary Escalation Graph and large language models (LLMs) to manage the entire life cycle of technical incidents.
Waypoint's AI Customer Support Engineer is able to automate triage and intake, create escalation reports, support developers in root cause analysis, and even build out incident timelines and postmortems in-depth. The result is a scalable means of handling technical escalations without engineering team burnout or an infringement on the customer experience.
"It's simple: help businesses scale without the loss of customer support or engineering attention," said Waypoint AI CEO Steve Boogar. "As organizations scale, reactive support disproportionately drains engineering capacity. Escalation workflow automation isn't merely about efficiency—it's about unlocking growth."
Early Results from Industry Leaders
Enterprise tech leaders such as ClickHouse and Kpler have already deployed Waypoint AI’s platform. Within weeks, they’ve reported a 50% reduction in mean time to resolution (MTTR), along with measurable improvements in engineering velocity and customer satisfaction.
What makes Waypoint AI’s platform stand out is its ability to embed directly within the tools teams already use—ticketing platforms, incident trackers, engineering dashboards, and internal communication tools. Instead of forcing a new workflow, the AI support engineer integrates into the existing support-to-engineering pipeline.
This forward-looking strategy ensures problems are fixed quicker, trends are indicated sooner, and tribal expertise—commonly hidden in scattered systems—is surfaced in real-time.
Operator Turned Investor Support
42CAP is backing Waypoint AI, whose co-founders launched and successfully exited two of the most successful B2B software businesses in Europe—Hybris (acquired by SAP) and eCircle (acquired by Teradata).
"Waypoint AI is addressing one of the largest blind spots of contemporary software operation," declared Thomas Wilke, General Partner at 42CAP. "We invest in product-focused founders that are solving hard problems with worldwide potential. The Waypoint team unites technical depth, domain expertise, and a bold vision for smart support automation."
Dreamcraft Ventures, a Danish early-stage venture firm specializing in digital entertainment and B2B SaaS, also participated in the round. The funding will support Waypoint AI in scaling its engineering team, especially at its Prague R&D center, and further scale its platform to address enterprise needs.
A New Category of AI for Customer Escalations
Waypoint AI is not a support automation tool or a chatbot. It's a new category of AI infrastructure, one that occurs at the intersection of product quality, incident response, and customer success.
Instead of deflecting support requests, it goes one step further, revealing root causes and speeding up repairs. Through its LLM-driven Escalation Graph, Waypoint connects chat log information, code commit information, support thread info, and documentation to provide support engineers and developers with a complete picture of every problem in context.
For contact centers, particularly in sophisticated B2B settings, this technology will close the gap between front-line servicing and technical resolution in ways previously unimaginable.
With the call for faster, better support remaining in 2025, solutions such as Waypoint AI may assist contact center executives in transitioning from reactive customer problem-solving toward proactive customer retention.
FAQs
1. What does Waypoint AI do in the contact center and support environment?
Waypoint AI serves as an AI-driven Customer Support Engineer that trues, investigates, and resolves customer-reported escalations automatically. Integrating into existing chat, engineering, and ticketing systems decreases mean time to resolution (MTTR), allowing support and engineering teams to devote their time to more valuable tasks.
2. In what way is Waypoint AI different from normal chatbots or support automation software?
In contrast to rule-based bots that deflect routine questions, Waypoint AI addresses high-impact, technical escalations by reviewing support tickets, internal docs, code commits, and incident threads. It employs large language models and a proprietary Escalation Graph to uncover root causes and create actionable postmortems, providing actual incident-level intelligence.
3. Which organizations are using Waypoint AI?
Enterprise technology firms such as ClickHouse and Kpler are already leveraging Waypoint AI’s platform. These early adopters have reported cutting their mean time to resolution in half and reclaiming up to 15% of engineering capacity that was previously spent on reactive escalations.
4. What business value does Waypoint AI offer contact centers or tech support teams?
Waypoint AI provides accelerated incident response, enhanced CSAT scores, and quantifiable decreases in engineering workload. For contact center executives, it serves as the bridge between developers and support agents, promoting cooperation, enhancing data accuracy, and empowering proactive issue resolution.
5. How does Waypoint AI integrate with current support operations?
Waypoint AI integrates natively into the existing stack of a company, such as customer support infrastructures, internal engineering tooling, chat platforms like Slack, and incident tracking dashboards. This natural integration allows teams to easily adopt smart escalation workflows without impacting their existing workflows.
