Posh AI

/ Startups / By

Founders: Karan Kashyap & Matt McEachern
Founding: 2018
Mission: Posh’s mission is to accelerate the responsible adoption of AI for financial institutions, empowering them to best serve their communities. Posh’s AI solutions span digital and voice channels. They are purpose-built to address challenges unique to the financial services industry, such as: alleviating long wait times in favor of warm, conversational customer self-service, enabling 24/7 access to banking services, creating lead-generation opportunities without compromising VIP customer service, and streamlining knowledge management.
Employees: 100 & 45% Local
Workplace: Remote first
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $35M raised
Investors: Canapi, JAM FINTOP, Curql, and TruStage
Key Customers: DCU, MassMutual Credit Union, Florida Credit Union, SalemFive
Glassdoor Rating: 5.0
Valuation (estimated): $100M – $300M (assuming they sold ~20% of the company in the Q3 ‘21 $31M Series A fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

Posh AI is a “conversational AI software company” focused on financial services companies, bringing better digital banking experiences to every financial institution. Founded in 2018 by Karan Kashyap & Matt McEachern out of MIT’s AI lab, Posh is transforming how financial services companies connect with their customers and automate contact center workflow.

Founders Karan & Matt met at MIT. As classmates, fraternity brothers, and friends I imagine they were sitting together after class in the Barker Library and got to chatting. It probably went a little something like this: “On the count of three, I want you to name your favorite technology. One, two, three… ‘natural language processing and conversational AI!’ WHAT? Did we just become best friends?!? YUP!”

Regional and local banking has undergone a sea change over the last decade. There have been no shortage of headlines in 2023, either.. Smaller institutions don’t have the same budgets or technical teams on staff to invest in customized digital technology solutions. While Bank of America or JP Morgan might have their own conversational AI & digital chatbot workflows, the smaller players need help! 

With a little more schooling, research, and $1M in earned consulting fees Karan & Matt set out to build a digital platform focused on small & mid size financial institutions. Give the power to the people, you know? They enmeshed themselves in the Boston financial services startup ecosystem, enrolling in Digital Credit Union’s accelerator program at the DCU Fintech Innovation Center and also winning MassChallenge’s $40k Fintech program Gold Prize.

What is Posh building? They provide 24/7 customer service with bank-savvy AI, building a vertical platform for credit unions and other mid & small size financial institutions. Their Digital Concierge handles frontline contact almost like a person, empowering Customer Service teams with simple language everyone can understand. Customers want quick answers and their software can provide instant, accurate info via a chatbot. And for more complicated inquiries, they can help route to an agent. All the while, their software is learning and capturing data on customer trends, usage, and transcripts to help improve performance.

Posh’s Voice Concierge receives calls and answers routine questions, resolving large workloads for customer service agents. By replacing touch-tone menus with natural conversations, they can provide a modern (and less frustrating) experience to keep conversations moving forward. And, like Digital Concierge, their voice solution can route to agents and share context when higher touch is needed. Voice 360 & Banking Teller uses conversational AI to complete transactions and is customizable to reflect the values, voice, and capabilities of individual institutions.

Working with their client, the Associated Credit Union of Texas (where everything is bigger of course because it’s Texas), Posh handled more than 51% of incoming calls, 60% of chat conversations, and decreased their call abandon rate by 93%.

Posh has most recently launched a Knowledge Assistant to help their customers’ employees get faster, easier access to internal information, using the latest generative AI technologies. So, instead of looking at spreadsheets or searching databases, they can more easily query the information on demand.

In November 2021, the team closed a $31M Series A venture round that will allow them to continue investing in their platform & team. Conversational AI is still in its nascent stage and Posh is laser focused on growing its Go To Market capabilities, R&D team, and continue to help level the playing field of the financial services industry. They work with 50+ institutions with their client base growing 40% and their headcount has growing by 45% in North America (U.S. & Canada), both over the past 12 months.

Operators to Know (Locally):

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Posh team I know I missed many up & coming local operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What are the biggest areas of focus for Posh over the next 2-4 quarters and the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 100 employees? 
  • Who are the biggest competitors? How has the rollout of LLMs (large language models) changed the course of the roadmap this year?
  • What is the long term vision for the company? 
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2023 // teams that need the most help?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Posh you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more financial institutions into the digital age. All credit unions, small & mid size financial institutions applaud your efforts. See you around town!

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