Cape Town-based customer service startup Cue has closed a $5 million funding round co-led by South African venture capital firm Knife Capital and FAM Investments, marking the company’s largest raise to date as it pushes deeper into autonomous AI agents.
Fresh Capital to Fund Engineering and Expansion
The new funding will go toward three main areas: expanding Cue’s engineering team to build more capable autonomous AI agents and voice infrastructure, scaling sales and marketing efforts across the UK and South Africa, and broadening the platform with additional communication channels, enterprise integrations, and analytics tools. The company has said it is particularly focused on strengthening security and voice capabilities as it moves toward more complex, end-to-end automation.
From WhatsApp Chat Support to Autonomous Agents
Cue built its early business helping companies manage customer conversations over WhatsApp and other messaging channels. It has since repositioned itself around autonomous AI agents capable of resolving customer queries end-to-end, without requiring human intervention in many cases. The company says its first-generation agents already resolve more than 60 percent of customer conversations autonomously, and the next iteration is designed to handle more complex, multi-step tasks such as qualifying sales leads, updating CRM records, checking order status, processing returns, and sending payment links.
Cue’s platform currently powers customer conversations for more than 500 companies across the UK and South Africa, spanning sectors including automotive, retail, insurance, finance, and education. The company says it now handles over 500 million messages and conversations annually, and grew annual recurring revenue by more than 160 percent year on year in its latest financial year.
Funding Trajectory Shows Rapid Growth
The $5 million round builds on a funding trajectory that began with a $500,000 pre-seed raise, followed by a $2 million seed round in 2024. This latest raise represents a significant step up in scale and signals growing investor confidence in Cue’s shift toward agentic AI, a category that has attracted rising attention as businesses look to cut support costs while improving service quality.
Positioning for a Shifting Customer Service Market
Cue’s leadership has framed the raise as part of a broader industry shift, arguing that customer service technology has historically evolved in silos, forcing businesses to juggle separate systems for voice, email, messaging, and social media. The company is betting that hybrid AI-human support models, rather than fully automated systems, will become the industry standard as enterprises balance automation with customer satisfaction.
The raise comes at a time when African tech startups have continued to attract significant funding despite a broader global slowdown in venture investment, with fintech and AI-driven platforms remaining among the most active categories for dealmaking on the continent.
