Two alumni of cybersecurity unicorn Verafin have returned to the startup world with an AI tool meant to help business-to-business product teams gather customer feedback, and just months after founding their new business, they have raised about $800,000.

Aucure is the creation of Andrea King, who spent a little over two years at Verafin before becoming NASDAQ’s Director of Media and Government Relations, and Brent Pretty, who ran Verafin’s AI automation team. Pretty is Aucure’s CEO, and King is COO.

The $800,000 is part of a larger funding round, the first tranche of which the team hopes to complete by fall, King said in an interview Monday, adding the company so far has five employees.

“We’re building AI agents for B2B software companies,” she said, with an AI agent being a tool that can interact with its digital environment to perform tasks, like gathering information. “It does customer interviews. So it actually will create the ‘call plan,’ do the interview using text or voice … and it instantly gathers their customer feedback of what they’re feeling about the product or what they need changed, or problems they’re having.”

The AI then analyzes the resulting data with the aim of identifying trends it can share with employees at the company conducting the research, making it possible to gather customer feedback at a scale that would be unfeasible for humans.

When a company using Aucure wants to gather customer feedback, it makes contact via an emailed link and records their responses in the form of a text chat or video. Later, King said she and Pretty plan to add the ability for users to share their screens, such as in order to point out specific elements of an application interface.

“The AI agents that we have act like the product manager would,” said King. “So a customer might say, ‘I really want an export button so that I can export my data into Excel.’ The AI agent and the LLM (large language model) … listens and asks probing questions. ‘Okay, so you want an export button, can you tell me why? And how would you use that?’

“It’s listening and then asking the next logical question that needs to be asked to understand what the customer wants.”

King and Pretty have been testing Aucure with a handful of beta users, and their initial beachhead market will be business-to-business software companies with between 50 and 250 employees. Later, they plan to target larger enterprise customers.

“We did these initial, early-validation calls with all these potential customers, and it was like an instant click: ‘Yes, I need that,’” said King, adding it would have been technologically unfeasible to build Aucure even a year ago.

“Some (prospective clients) were like, ‘I’m trying to solve this problem right now.’ So it was very evident to us that the time is now.”