About Decagon
Decagon is the leading conversational AI platform empowering every brand to deliver concierge customer experiences.
Our technology enables industry-defining enterprises like Avis Budget Group, Block’s Cash App and Square, Chime, Oura Health, and Hunter Douglas to deploy AI agents that power personalized, deeply satisfying interactions across voice, chat, email, SMS, and every other channel.
We’re building a future where customer experiences are being redefined from support tickets and hold music to faster resolutions, richer conversations, and deeper relationships. We’re proud to be backed by world-class investors who share that vision, including a16z, Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, and Index Ventures, along with many others.
We’re an in-office company, driven by a shared commitment to excellence and velocity. Our values — Just Get It Done, Invent What Customers Want, Winner’s Mindset, and The Polymath Principle — shape how we work and grow as a team.
About the Role
We're looking for a Growth Engineer to own the technical surface areas that drive Decagon's growth – including our website and technical growth products that go beyond what a marketing team can typically ship on its own – interactive tools, AI-powered demo experiences, and other product-like growth tools. You'll own the strategy behind what gets built and in what order, treating the site as a product with a real roadmap rather than a series of one-off requests.
What you might build
Tools that automate the creation of customized assets and experiences – a personalized landing page builder, interactive voice demos, and similar – built once and distributed across channels to drive pipeline growth.
Internal tooling that automates manual work in ad platforms for our paid digital team – audience building, bid/budget adjustments, reporting rollups, etc.
Agents that pull from our own AI stack, Salesforce, and marketing tools to surface key intent signals to our Sales team.
In this role, you will
Own the website as a product: Take website strategy, prioritization, and roadmap ownership – deciding what gets built, in what order, and why, balancing growth impact against everything else competing for the site's attention. Help build the technical foundation for our website and growth surfaces to work well across international markets as we expand.
Build technical growth products beyond the website: Design and ship the kinds of tools described above – things that need engineering judgment, not just marketing execution, and that leverage Decagon's own AI stack to create novel prospect experiences that convert into quality pipeline.
Drive conversion rate optimization: Establish the testing infrastructure and cadence that lets the team run structured experiments on the site.
Grow the team around you: As the work compounds, hire and mentor the specialists who take on day-to-day ownership of website execution, SEO/AEO, and related functions. You'll shape what that team looks like and how it operates.
Partner cross-functionally: Work closely with the rest of the growth/demand gen team, product engineering, and regional sales leadership to make sure technical growth investments track where the business actually needs them.
Your background looks something like this
5+ years of experience in software engineering, with growth/marketing exposure and a track record of shipping real technical products.
Have owned a company's website or a comparable technical growth surface as a product — with accountability for strategy, prioritization, and outcomes.
Comfortable operating across the full stack of what "technical growth" means: CMS architecture, hands-on product-style builds (APIs, integrations, AI-powered tooling), etc.
Have built and shipped growth-oriented products or tools.
Strong enough technical judgment to evaluate and eventually manage specialists in SEO/AEO and website ops if you're not doing that work yourself long-term.
Thrive in ambiguity — this role starts as a mix of building things yourself and figuring out what to hire for, and the shape of your team six months from now may look different from what's written here.
Even better if you have
Experience standing up a website or product experience across multiple international markets or languages.
Experience with AI/LLM-powered tooling in a growth or marketing context
Experience with tools like Clay, Webflow, Gumloop, Dust, etc.
Compensation
$180,000 - $225,000 + Equity
Benefits
We proudly offer the following benefits for our full-time employees:
Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family
Life Insurance and Disability Benefits
Retirement Plan (e.g., 401K, pension)
Parental Leave
Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot
Monthly stipend to support your wellness, lifestyle, and work-life balance
Daily lunches and snacks in the office to keep you at your best
Take what you need vacation policy (subject to local requirements; UK employees receive 25 days of statutory leave)
These benefits are described in more detail in Decagon’s policies, may vary by location, and can change at any time according to applicable compensation and benefits plans.
Decagon builds AI customer support agents for large businesses, handling customer questions and requests over voice, chat, email, and text messages. Its platform connects these conversations to company records and internal tools, so an agent can check an order, change a reservation, or complete a support task. Customer experience teams define how agents should respond and when to pass a case to a person, while testing tools check behavior before changes reach customers. Businesses pay usage fees for the software, with charges tied to conversations or completed resolutions rather than the number of human support staff. Decagon was founded in 2023 and is headquartered in San Francisco.
Company Size
501-1,000
Company Stage
Series D
Total Funding
$481M
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
Founded
2023
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AI voice firms now sell consent. Two of them are also switching voices off. Three AI voice companies launched new voices in early October, and all three used the word consent in the pitch. In the same fortnight, two others said they're switching voices off. If you're a working voice actor thinking about licensing your voice, both halves of that news matter. It's been a crowded few weeks in AI voice. Microsoft, HeyGen and the customer service company Decagon all released new voice models between 1 and 9 October. Meanwhile Hume told developers its text-to-speech service closes on 13 November, and OpenAI set a date to retire its oldest speech models. Voice Over Herald read the announcements so you don't have to. Here's what each company actually said, what it didn't say, and what a voice actor should take from it. Consent is now a selling point. Decagon launched Chord, its first speech model, on 1 October. The company's blog says "Chord is trained on licensed data and consented voice talent, never on customer-owned data." It also claims that in a blind test across three voices, "approximately 90% of users couldn't tell" which was the human. It doesn't say how many people took the test. HeyGen followed on 9 October with HeyGen Voice, free inside its platform, plus a Professional Voice Clone add-on at $99 a month. The clone is trained on "30 minutes to three hours of the owner's speech," and the company says it "requires the voice owner's explicit consent." Microsoft's MAI-Voice-2.1 arrived on 1 October. It supports 23 languages and 26 locales, "enabling one single 'voice' to use all languages with a truly native accent." Microsoft says it can clone a voice "using just a few seconds of reference audio," with "built-in consent guardrails that prevent misuse." A year ago, most AI voice launches talked about speed and realism. This round, every one of them mentioned consent. That's progress, and it's progress voice actors and their unions pushed for. What the announcements leave out. Consent is one word. A contract has a lot more in it. None of the three announcements says how the voice talent behind the models were paid, whether they're paid again when their voice is used, how long the licence runs, or what happens if they want out. What they said Consent. "Licensed data and consented voice talent." "Explicit consent." "Built-in consent guardrails." What they didn't say The terms. How the talent were paid, for how long, in which languages, and whether they can withdraw. That gap matters more with Microsoft's model. If one voice can speak 23 languages with a native accent, a single recording session could stand in for work that used to go to 23 different voice actors. Consent from the person who recorded it doesn't answer the question for the other 22. And then the voices go dark. On 2 October, Hume posted a one-paragraph notice: "Hume is sunsetting the TTS and EVI APIs. Access ends November 13, 2026 at 12:01 a.m. EST." It added: "Any data in your account is permanently deleted after November 13, 2026." No reason was given. OpenAI's deprecation page, dated 1 October, says its tts-1, tts-1-hd and two gpt-4o-mini-tts models "will be removed from the API on January 6, 2027," and tells developers to move to a newer model. Companies retire old products all the time. For a voice actor, though, it's a useful reminder. A synthetic voice lives on someone else's server, under someone else's business plan. If a client builds an e-learning course or a phone menu on an AI voice and the service closes, that voice is gone, and so is the consistency the client was paying for. A human recording sits in a WAV file on the client's drive. It doesn't get deprecated. What this means if you're asked to license your voice. More of these offers are coming, and some will be worth taking. Before you sign one, get answers in writing to the questions the press releases skip: * Pay. Is it a one-off fee, or are you paid each time your voice is used? * Scope. Which products, which clients and which languages can use it? * Term. How long does the licence run, and can you end it? * Shutdown. If the service closes or the company is sold, what happens to your voice model and your recordings? * Deletion. Hume deletes account data after it closes. Make sure your contract says the same about your voice, and when. The technology will keep improving. The good news in this month's launches is that the companies now feel they have to say the word consent. The job for voice actors is to make sure the word comes with terms attached. Sources: Decagon, "Voice 3", 1 October 2026; HeyGen press release, "HeyGen Launches HeyGen Voice", PR Newswire, 9 October 2026; Microsoft AI, "Our first streaming transcription model", 1 October 2026; Hume developer changelog, 2 October 2026; OpenAI API deprecations page, 1 October 2026. Enjoyed it? Pass it on Know something about this story, or spotted an error? Tell the newsroom.
AI customer service startup Decagon held early buyout talks with ServiceNow. Decagon, valued at $4.5 billion after a January Series D and a March tender offer, counts Duolingo, Notion, and Hertz among its clients, Business Insider reported on the preliminary ServiceNow discussions. Decagon has not even finished spending its last funding round, and buyers are already circling. Business Insider reported on October 13 that the AI customer service agent startup held early M&A talks with ServiceNow and other potential acquirers. Decagon, the three-year-old company that builds AI agents to handle customer support calls and chats for brands like Duolingo, Notion, Hertz, and Deutsche Telekom, has been in early acquisition discussions with ServiceNow and other suitors, Business Insider reported Tuesday. The talks are preliminary, according to the report, but their existence alone says something about where the AI agent market stands right now: enterprise software giants would rather write a check than spend years building the same technology in-house. The timing is what makes this notable. Decagon closed a $250 million Series D in January led by Coatue Management and Index Ventures, tripling its valuation to $4.5 billion, according to Bloomberg. In March, the company completed a tender offer at that same $4.5 billion mark, TechCrunch reported, letting early employees and investors cash out some shares. That is not the profile of a company that needs to sell. It's the profile of one that doesn't have to, and is still getting calls anyway. ServiceNow has spent 2025 and 2026 buying its way into agentic AI rather than building every piece of it from scratch. The company agreed to buy Moveworks, an AI assistant maker, for $2.85 billion in March 2025. It also bought the AI-native conversation analysis platform Cuein. And after Bloomberg reported that it was in advanced talks to buy cybersecurity firm Armis, ServiceNow announced the $7.75 billion deal and completed it in April 2026. Bloomberg has described the pace as a deja vu of McDermott's years running SAP, where acquisitions were also the default growth lever. Decagon would fit a clear gap. ServiceNow sells workflow software to the same enterprise IT buyers who are now being pitched standalone AI customer service agents, and Decagon said it added more than 100 enterprise customers in 2025, spanning travel, financial services, health, and retail. Buying that customer base and the underlying agent technology is faster than spending years rebuilding Decagon's product work on voice, chat, email, and SMS support from scratch. ServiceNow reported Q2 2026 revenue beating the $3.92 billion consensus estimate, with multi-product Now Assist AI deals growing nearly 70% year over year. CEO Bill McDermott reiterated the company's $1.5 billion AI annual contract value target for 2026, giving enterprise software bulls their clearest data point yet that AI is producing durable... - ServiceNow Q2 earnings beat revenue - AI deals driving software revenue growth Decagon isn't the only one proving this thesis. NiCE bought the AI customer service company Cognigy for $955 million, a deal that, like the ServiceNow-Moveworks transaction, signaled that legacy contact-center and workflow vendors see AI agents as something to acquire rather than compete against from scratch. What this means for the rest of the AI agent field. Frankly, this is the signal every other AI agent startup founder is watching for. The agentic AI market has been thick with venture money for two years, and a lot of these companies look similar on paper: a slick agent orchestration layer sitting on top of a foundation model, sold into enterprise support, sales, or ops teams. Funding rounds prove investors believe in the category. Early M&A talks prove the giants who actually touch these enterprise customers are also starting to believe in specific companies within it. Decagon, co-founded in 2023 by Jesse Zhang and Ashwin Sreenivas, went from stealth to a $4.5 billion valuation in under two years, according to the company's own funding announcements. That speed is exactly why a buyer would rather move now than wait. The later a target gets, the more expensive and the more independent it becomes, and the weaker an acquirer's hand is walking into the room. None of this means a deal happens. Early talks fall apart more often than they close, and Decagon, flush with cash from two rounds and a tender offer, has no obvious financial reason to sell. But the fact that ServiceNow is willing to sit down and talk, even informally, tells competitors like Zendesk and the dozens of smaller AI agent startups exactly how this market consolidates when it does: not through slow attrition, but through the biggest platform players buying the sharpest point solutions before their price tags get too big to justify. ServiceNow Ventures has taken a 5% stake in BusinessNext, an Indian AI banking software company, at a $700 million valuation. The $40 million deal is as much a distribution partnership as an investment, tying BusinessNext's AI agents into ServiceNow's AI Control Tower governance platform as the race to monitor and control enterprise agents... - enterprise AI agent governance platform - ServiceNow banking software investment 2026 Join the discussion. No replies yet. Start the discussion. Elroy is a digital marketer and developer from Goa, with over a decade of experience web development and marketing. He has been associated with several startups and serves currently as an Editor to the Asia Pacific Industrial magazine. He occasionally writes on Startup Fortune about technology and automation.
Decagon open-sources PACT protocol to standardize AI agent interoperability. Decagon has released the Personal Agent Consent & Trust (PACT) protocol to standardize how AI agents interact with businesses while ensuring user privacy. AIDeveloper44 Team A conceptual diagram showing the secure, token-based handshake between personal agents and business systems. * Decagon has introduced the PACT protocol to allow secure, authenticated communication between personal AI agents and business systems. * The protocol leverages OAuth 2.0 and Agent2Agent standards to separate agent identity from customer consent. * PACT is being developed as an open standard to facilitate consistent integrations across different AI platforms. The need for standardized agent communication. As the adoption of personal AI agents increases, these systems are beginning to handle more complex tasks on behalf of users, such as booking appointments, managing account subscriptions, and negotiating purchases. Previously, these interactions often mimicked human behavior by driving web interfaces, which presented security risks and authentication challenges. Brands struggled to verify the identity of the AI agents contacting them, and users were forced to share credentials to enable automated actions. To address these challenges, Decagon has open-sourced the Personal Agent Consent & Trust (PACT) protocol. Developed in collaboration with Instinct, the protocol aims to provide a secure framework for personal agents to interact with the support infrastructure of businesses. By creating a standardized interface, PACT allows businesses to verify which platform is acting on behalf of a user while ensuring that sensitive login information remains private. Protocol design and architecture. The PACT protocol is built upon existing technologies, specifically the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol and OAuth 2.0. This design choice enables developers to use established standards for identity and authorization. According to the technical documentation, the protocol functions through three distinct parties: the personal agent platform, the business (Brand), and the provider hosting the support agent. The interaction process is broken down into three logical phases: * Discovery and Connection: Personal agents discover a business's "Agent Card," which lists the endpoint and available permissions (scopes). The personal agent then authenticates its requests using a signed JSON Web Token (JWT). * Consent and Authentication: Rather than sharing passwords, users sign in directly with the business. The business then issues a delegation token that specifies the exact permissions granted to the agent. * Execution: The personal agent presents the delegation token alongside its identity, allowing the business's agent to perform actions strictly within the pre-defined constraints. Separating identity from authority. A key principle behind PACT is the separation of identity from authority. The protocol enables a business to verify that a request is coming from a legitimate, trusted personal agent independently of whether that agent has been granted specific permissions to modify a user's account. This decoupling allows for more granular security policies, as businesses can define their own authorization scopes, such as read-only access to order history versus the ability to perform cancellations. Industry collaboration and adoption. Decagon has stated that PACT is intended to be an open industry standard. The company has joined the Personal Agent Protocol working group, which was previously announced by the development team behind Muse. By publishing the specification and code on GitHub, the organizers aim to encourage adoption among other personal agent developers, support vendors, and businesses. The goal is to ensure that a user's choice of personal agent is not limited by the platforms a specific business chooses to support. By providing a consistent integration pattern, PACT seeks to reduce the friction developers face when building cross-platform agent systems. Whether acting as a personal assistant or an automated concierge, agents using PACT can operate with verified credentials while adhering to business-side security and policy constraints. References & Sources
Decagon launches AI for the era of personal agents at Dialogues. Search. New products for the next frontier headline the company's second annual flagship conference, plus new partnerships and industry-leading speakers Decagon, the leader in conversational AI agents for concierge customer experiences, today hosts its second annual flagship conference, Decagon Dialogues, ushering in an era of AI that meets customers - and their agents - however they choose to engage. With Voice 3, Personal Agent Gateway, Agent Modules, and Duet Apprentice, Decagon is meeting the moment where customers expect to be treated like someone the business already knows, not a ticket number in a queue. Frontier AI models are intelligent about the world in general, but a model that knows the world is not the same as one that knows a specific business: its policies, its systems, its customers, and the knowledge that used to live in one person's head. Closing that gap is what Decagon spent the last year building toward, and today's product launches are the result. Frontier models keep improving, but still don't account for the nuances of how an agent should sound on the phone, how it should interact with a customer versus that customer's personal agent, how a bank conducts a fraud dispute versus how an airline rebooks a stranded passenger, or how a company onboards and trains its best teammates. Each product announced today delivers that expertise: * Voice 3 knows customer experience, combining a new duplex architecture with Chord, the first voice model from Decagon Labs, for more natural customer conversations. Most voice agents combine general-purpose speech models with cascaded pipelines that struggle to coordinate conversation with ongoing work. Customers hear the result in stiff delivery and awkward pauses or interruptions. The Chord voice model is built for the intonation and natural pauses of a live call, slowing down for details like confirmation codes, then returning to a conversational pace. Voice 3 also introduces a new duplex architecture where conversation and task execution run in parallel, letting the voice agent narrate its progress and answer follow-up questions during a long-running task, rather than putting the customer on hold. * Personal Agent Gateway knows your customers however they arrive, helping you identify and serve personal agents on your terms.Personal agents like Muse, Instinct, and dots now book, buy, cancel, and negotiate for customers, and they are already showing up in support queues. Personal Agent Gateway detects whether a human or a personal agent is on the other end, using signals from your business, such as account history, and from the platform, like request cadence. Personal agents are routed to a dedicated channel where your agent resolves requests directly in a fraction of the time and cost. Personal Agent Gateway authenticates the agent, limits what it can do, and requires approval from the owner behind it for sensitive actions, declining if they can't be reached. * Agent Modules know your industry, extending your agent across the customer journey in financial services, travel and hospitality, healthcare, retail, technology, and telecom.Expanding beyond traditional support requires teaching your agent new workflows, requirements, and measures of success. Instead of requiring teams to build the infrastructure for each journey from scratch, modules bring together the orchestration each journey requires, adapted to your specific processes and business context. As modules extend your agent across more journeys, a shared management layer lets each team manage its part of the agent with separate access controls, while giving admins visibility across the whole customer relationship. Memory carries across conversations and channels, so the customer from a sales call last month is recognized when the onboarding call begins. * Duet Apprentice knows your business, enabling your agent to learn like your best people and keep pace as your business changes. With Apprentice, Duet studies your existing internal resources and learns from the escalated conversations your experienced reps handle. That knowledge grounds how it drafts Agent Operating Procedures (AOPs), runs Simulations, and analyzes conversations. Duet also keeps learning and working alongside your team after launch, following Slack and Microsoft Teams discussions as policies and plans change. Tag Duet into a thread and it can draft the AOP updates; when something is ambiguous, it proactively asks for clarity in the same channel. What Duet learns belongs to you, stays in your workspace, and isn't used to train models outside it. Frontier models know the world. They do not, on their own, know any one business, and that is the gap Decagon exists to close. "The promise of AI within customer experience is not just a support channel that happens to use AI, but a singular 'front door' for customers to interact with a business and carry them through the entire journey," said Jesse Zhang, Co-founder and CEO of Decagon. "With these new products and partnerships, we're bringing this vision to reality." Speakers across industries share how Decagon changed their businesses. This year's Dialogues lineup brings together experts from retail, healthcare, travel and hospitality, insurance, finance, and technology, all using Decagon to deliver concierge experiences. Select speakers include: * Eric Phillips, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer, Delta Air Lines, joins the opening keynote to discuss how AI is reshaping customer experience at one of the world's largest airlines. * Samuel Liyanage, Vice President of Digital Customer Experience, and Misty Shafer Sterne, Vice President of Commercial Technology, both of American Airlines, explain how to design AI-powered journeys that build trust and loyalty. * Adam Terk, Vice President of Operations, Carrot, connects the healthcare experience across every touchpoint a patient has with the business and shares the outcome. * Diana Rainesh, Senior Vice President of Strategy & Analytics Support & Operations, Ticketmaster, describes using AI to power product discovery and personalization at scale. Partnerships take customer service to the next level In addition to recently announced partnerships with companies like OpenAI and AWS, Decagon continues to expand its ecosystem capabilities: * Decagon is partnering with Databricks to bring governed enterprise data into every customer conversation. Many of the most useful answers a Decagon agent could give - order status, entitlements, product usage, payment history - live in the Databricks Data + AI Platform rather than the conversation itself. Historically, surfacing that context meant building and maintaining bespoke data pipelines, with sensitive customer data copied into a new system each time. Working with Databricks, Decagon agents now read that record directly, so agents act on real-time customer context with no ETL and no new copy of the data. Conversation data flows back the same way, enriching Databricks tables with intent, sentiment, and root-cause insights. The partnership will also extend to inference: Decagon has joined Databricks' Built on program and will route model calls through Unity Gateway, so governance, lineage, and audit trails cover agent activity the same way they cover the rest of a customer's data estate. Decagon is also a launch partner on Databricks Marketplace, letting customers purchase Decagon through their existing Databricks relationship. * Decagon and Plaid are partnering so AI agents can complete complex financial tasks directly within a conversation. Many of the most common requests in financial services require the customer to log into their bank first. That means sending them outside the conversation to authenticate their account, which breaks the conversation and often ends it. Working with Plaid, Decagon agents can resolve account issues in real time, within the agent conversation. Consumers can complete a claim, recover a failed payment, manage applications, and handle disputes with full context from prior conversations, including the steps that require financial account access. The partnership ensures trust and safety, operating at the level of oversight financial services require. Plaid powers consumer-permissioned account access, and agent guardrails stay exactly as Decagon's financial services customers already run them.
Decagon says customers will be able to use OpenAI committed spending for its AI agents. The marketplace listing is still pending. Pricing, deployment options and instructions for applying commitments will follow. The audio brief. About 1:30 Read transcript Story brief. 3 key points For enterprise buyers, Decagon's planned OpenAI marketplace listing could make its customer-facing AI agents purchasable through existing OpenAI spending commitments, shifting the partnership from technical collaboration toward a procurement route. The arrangement does not change the agents' described model mix: Decagon combines OpenAI models with specialized models post-trained by Decagon Labs. The practical value depends on which customers qualify and how much commitment they can use - details Decagon has not yet disclosed. * 01 Decagon announced on October 2, 2026, that it is a launch partner for OpenAI's business-to-business marketplace. * 02 Only eligible OpenAI enterprise customers can apply part of a commitment; Decagon has not specified eligibility criteria or the amount available. * 03 Decagon says its marketplace listing will go live "soon," but has provided no launch date. An existing OpenAI spending commitment will give eligible enterprise customers another way to pay for customer-facing AI agents. Decagon said on October 2, 2026, that it is a launch partner for OpenAI's business-to-business marketplace. Under the arrangement, customers can apply part of their OpenAI commitment toward Decagon, although the company's marketplace listing is still to come. From technical partner to purchasing channel. The relationship predates the marketplace announcement. Decagon says it became a preferred partner in OpenAI's enterprise ecosystem earlier in 2026, working with the company on AI-powered customer experiences. The marketplace partnership builds on that earlier work. OpenAI models are an important part of Decagon's model lineup, the company says. They sit alongside specialized models that Decagon Labs post-trains - further trains for customer-experience work. That mixed lineup is the technical foundation Decagon describes behind its customer-facing agents, rather than a service built only around OpenAI models. Decagon's pitch for the new channel is simpler procurement: the purchasing process businesses use to approve and buy software. It argues that using the marketplace will reduce friction between a buying decision and deployment. That is the company's expected benefit of the arrangement. For businesses assessing the service, Decagon also points to configurable removal of personally identifiable information and layered guardrails that run before, during and after each conversation. These are safeguards the company describes for its agents, alongside its enterprise compliance claims. The next step is publication of the marketplace listing. Decagon says it will go live "soon," with deployment options, pricing and instructions for applying an OpenAI commitment. It has not given a specific launch date. In the meantime, interested businesses can contact its partnerships team at [email protected] to learn more about the planned offering. Sources. * decagon.aiDecagon is partnering with OpenAI on its new B2B marketplace | Decagon