December 12, 2025
Customer Experience Attracted More Investment and M&A Activity in 2025
We’ve covered plenty of updates from investment side of the CX and AI worlds this year.
But, with a spot of digging into the depths of the venture capital scene, we’ve found many more new and scaling products and services. All making their mark in the world with major investment.
With AI everywhere, what else are the investors looking at when it comes to employee and customer experience?
The Solidroad More Travelled
We start with Ireland’s Solidroad (operating out of San Francisco), that recently picked up $6.5 million in seed funding from Y Combinator and others.
Solidroad offers an AI QA and training platform for modern customer experience teams.
Aimed at companies that don’t believe in fully automating 100% of their customer interactions, but who want to ensure high-quality CX 100% of the time.
It reviews every customer conversation and turns each interaction, human or AI, into a chance to develop better customer service. Success highlights include:
- Crypto.com used Solidroad to cut their average handling time by 18% and improve CSAT by 3%.
- Podium halved their new hire ramp time by embedding our simulations into onboarding.
- ActiveCampaign saved the equivalent of a year of coaching time and reinvested that time in better training and faster feedback loops.
From the Outset for CXM
Outset this month secured $30 nillion in series B funding as it plans to launch the an AI-Native Customer Experience Management Platform for researchers.
The company delivers meaningful AI-moderated research insights in minimal time.
“Outset is not just automating research; they are fundamentally rewriting the operating system for customer understanding,” said Richa Mehta, Radical Ventures, Partner. “Aaron, Michael, and the team at Outset have built a sophisticated AI architecture that captures deep human insight and preferences at scale, bringing the technical rigor and commercial traction to define this category.”
We’ll also mention Aaru, an 18-month old SF-based firm in the AI synthetic research space, claiming to recreate any population through demographics and phsychographics.
Aaru picked up undisclosed series A funding this month, led by Redpoint Ventures. It runs Lumen, a private sector tool to simulate executive intentions and customer segments, for marketing or product innovation.
Other interesting investment deals included:
- London’s Rocketphone.ai picking up $10.5 million for unified customer conversations
- Series A funding for $22 million went to HelloPatient.com to improve the healthcare customer experience
- And Awardco snaffled $165 for its employee rewards and recognition platform in the EX space.
Mergers and Acquisitions in CX
2026 was a busy year on the M&A front, ending this week with the Verint acquisition by Thoma Bravo.
In the summer, NiCE announced it would acquire Cognigy for just shy of a $billion to create a unified CX AI platform. But the mega-bucks deal of the year came from Qualtrics for Press Ganey and Forsta at $6.75 billion
Other mega-deals saw Capgemini acquire India’s WNS for $3.5 billion to create a global agentic leader for business process management. And there will be many more in 2026 as AI tools are consolidated around the CX and wider SaaS industry.
What’s coming in 2026? Certainly more deals, as CX becomes an integral part of every business and the SaaS giants try to round out their offerings.
