The Big Picture
EliseAI just closed a $250M Series E led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Bessemer, Sapphire Ventures, and Navitas Capital joining in.
The company builds agentic AI that handles the messy, multi-step work inside healthcare and housing—two systems that touch nearly everyone and are infamously hard to navigate.
Since last year, EliseAI grew from ~150 to 300+ employees, crossed $100M ARR, and is rolling out deeper automation for call centers, scheduling, prior auth, tours, lease audits, and maintenance—all with a focus on accurate, compliant, human-sounding conversations.
Why this matters: these are real workflows, not chat toys.
When AI reliably books visits, answers policy questions, and routes edge cases, customers get help faster and your teams spend time on higher-value work.
What’s New At EliseAI (And Why It’s Different)
Agentic workflows, not macros.
Multi-step tasks (e.g., “find the right provider, check benefits, book the slot, capture info”) are handled end-to-end.
Operational impact.
Practices report lower wait times, fewer abandoned calls, and up to 25% lower overhead—the kind of outcomes CFOs notice.
Two tough industries.
Healthcare admin costs top hundreds of billions; housing operators fight rising costs and high turnover. If AI can win here, it can win anywhere.
Hiring to scale.
Teams are growing across NYC, SF, Boston, and Chicago to speed up product and customer delivery.
Why This Matters For Customer Success
As a CS leader, your job is to shorten time-to-value, reduce effort, and prove revenue impact.
AI that removes waiting, rework, and handoffs does all three:
Faster first value.
Appointment set, lease step cleared, or issue routed in minutes—not days—means earlier wins and less “silent churn.” If onboarding is your leak, grab my playbook in The Onboarding Fix Every CS Leader Needs to turn quick wins into momentum.
Scalable service without headcount bloat.
Use automation for the repetitive 80%, keep people for judgment and relationships. If you’re building from scratch, my Build Customer Success From Zero: 7-Day Plan + Checklists gives you the stack, events, and alerts to go live fast.
Better signals, stronger renewals.
When calls, tickets, and scheduling data are structured, risk shows up earlier. Wire that into 15 Churn Alerts Every CS Leader Needs to protect revenue.
Career advantage in the agent era.
This is the shift I flagged when I wrote Databricks Hits $4B Run-Rate: What CS Leaders Should Do Now—agentic workflows are going mainstream, and CS needs to lead, not just adopt.
For a broader runway, see Why AI Matters In CS (But Only 14% Are Ready) to benchmark your team.
A 30-Day CS Plan You Can Ship Now
Week 1 — Map the work.
Pick one volume-heavy flow (e.g., rescheduling, eligibility, lease status). Capture current steps, tools, and handoffs. Define “first value” for the customer in a single sentence.
Week 2 — Instrument signals.
Track: time-to-first-response, time-to-first-value, abandonment rate, and repeat contacts. Add two alerts from 15 Churn Alerts Every CS Leader Needs that tie directly to this flow.
Week 3 — Pilot the assist.
Use AI to assist first (suggest responses, auto-fill forms, draft follow-ups). Keep humans in the loop on edge cases.
Week 4 — Automate the obvious.
Promote the top 2 high-confidence steps to auto-execute with fallbacks. Show the revenue math in your QBR. If reliability is a concern, borrow the SLO checklist from Baseten’s $150M Series D: Faster, Cheaper AI Inference to make performance visible to execs.
The CS Metrics To Watch
TTFV (time-to-first-value): Target a 25–40% drop on the piloted journey.
Cost-to-serve: Track volume handled per CSM/agent and rework rates.
Customer effort score: Ask one question after the flow: “How easy was this?”
Renewal risk: Did alerts fire earlier? Did your team resolve them faster?
My Take
Funding is flowing to production-grade AI on messy workflows.
CS should own the business case and the rollout: pick a journey, prove the time and cost delta, and then scale.
If you’re not sure where to start, my Build Customer Success From Zero: 7-Day Plan + Checklists will get your stack, events, and success stories in place in a week.
And if your team is still warming up to AI, level-set with Why AI Matters In CS (But Only 14% Are Ready) so you can lead with clarity.
Enjoyed this breakdown? Get one practical CS briefing every week—news, templates, and playbooks you can ship in days, not quarters.
—Hakan | Founder, The Customer Success Café Weekly Newsletter