Decimal AI Raises $4M to Erase Software’s ‘Hidden Costs’ with AI Engineers

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – September 15, 2026 – In a move signaling a significant shift in how software companies manage technical complexity, Decimal AI today announced a $4 million seed funding round co-led by Khosla Ventures and Kearny Jackson. The startup is tackling what legendary investor Vinod Khosla calls “one of software’s biggest hidden costs”: the ever-expanding burden of technical customer support. Rather than just another chatbot, Decimal AI is introducing a new category it calls “Customer Engineering,” powered by an AI Support Engineer that dives directly into a product’s code, logs, and production data to resolve issues that would typically require costly engineering escalations.

The funding, which includes participation from Atlassian Ventures and Weekend Fund, will fuel the expansion of a platform already delivering dramatic results for early adopters like Resilinc, Tealium, and Lucidworks. By creating a new intelligence layer between support and engineering, Decimal AI is betting that it can fundamentally reshape the economics of the modern software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, turning a costly operational drag into a streamlined, efficient function.

The Vicious Cycle of Velocity and Support

In today’s competitive landscape, the mantra is to ship faster. AI-powered developer tools have enabled companies to exponentially increase their product velocity. However, this acceleration comes with a steep, often unanticipated, price. Each new feature, integration, and update introduces new layers of complexity, leading to a corresponding explosion in the volume and technicality of customer support tickets.

“AI has enabled the best companies to exponentially increase shipping velocity, but with that comes an exponential increase in support needs,” noted Hari Arul, a partner at Khosla Ventures. This creates a vicious cycle: support teams, lacking deep engineering context, become overwhelmed. Tickets are escalated, pulling expensive engineers away from building the core product to troubleshoot customer-specific problems. Resolution times lengthen, customer satisfaction plummets, and the operational costs balloon.

It is this fundamental tension that Decimal AI aims to resolve. “Support is becoming one of software's biggest hidden costs,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. “Decimal changes those economics entirely with an AI platform that understands the code and customer context as well as the best support engineers.” By embedding engineering-level intelligence directly into the first line of support, the company seeks to break the escalation chain before it even starts.

Pioneering a New Category: The Rise of Customer Engineering

Decimal AI’s leadership and investors are not merely building a better support tool; they are evangelizing the creation of an entirely new business function. “We think Customer Engineering becomes its own category, the way GTM Engineering did,” stated Sriram Krishnan, co-founder and general partner at Kearny Jackson. This vision positions the platform not as an add-on, but as a foundational piece of infrastructure for any company selling a technical product.

Unlike traditional AI support tools that primarily analyze past tickets and documentation to suggest answers, Decimal’s AI Support Engineer operates with a real-time, ground-truth understanding of the product itself. It connects directly to the systems that engineers use daily: code repositories, logging platforms, configuration databases, and production data. This allows it to move beyond pattern-matching and perform true root cause analysis.

“Customer support should not have to operate from a secondhand description of the product,” explained Sanjeet Hajarnis, co-founder and CEO of Decimal AI. “The answer to customer questions is usually sitting in what the product actually did. We built Decimal to surface that evidence the moment a ticket arrives, not after a customer has waited through many escalation cycles.”

This approach transforms the role of a support agent from a simple conduit of information to a supervisor of an AI-powered investigation, armed with evidence and actionable insights from the very start.

From Support Ticket to Code Fix: The Bottom-Line Impact

The business value of this model is already being proven by early customers. Since the beginning of 2026, the volume of support interactions resolved by Decimal AI has grown 15-fold. For supply chain risk management firm Resilinc, the platform delivered a staggering 62% reduction in mean time to resolution (MTTR), cutting the average time from 6.5 days to just 2.5 days.

At another customer, Granola, the results have been transformative. The company now handles twice its previous ticket volume, and a remarkable 70% of common questions are resolved in chat before they can even become formal tickets. The AI also automates deep-dive investigations and even contributes back to the company’s knowledge base by auto-generating pull requests to improve documentation.

“Decimal is especially great at surfacing the issues where we realize there's something else going on and we need to dig deeper and Decimal has already gotten to the bottom of it,” said Vicky Firth, head of customer experience at Granola. “In general, it's sped us up a lot and saved us from digging through all those systems.”

This capability—to not only answer a question but to investigate, diagnose, and even propose a fix for engineering review—represents a paradigm shift. It directly attacks the highest-cost component of support: the time spent by engineers on debugging customer issues.

A Bet on Deep-Tech Expertise

The ambition to create a new software category is backed by a founding team with a rare combination of experience in enterprise AI, large-scale infrastructure, and hyper-growth product development. CEO Sanjeet Hajarnis previously led AI at Eightfold AI as it scaled past $100 million in revenue, and was an early engineer on core systems at Facebook and Uber. CTO Kevin Raji Cherian built Databricks' vector search product from the ground up and led critical infrastructure at Eightfold that powered matching across a billion profiles.

This deep, hands-on experience was a key factor for investors. “Sanjeet and Kevin didn't build this from the outside. They have the scar tissue and the expertise to close the gap between support and engineering, and that's why some of the most technically sophisticated companies in the market trust them,” said Sunil Chhaya, co-founder and general partner at Kearny Jackson.

With its new capital, Decimal AI plans to expand the range of technical issues its system can autonomously investigate and deepen its integrations across the support and engineering tools its customers already use. For the growing number of software companies grappling with the consequences of their own success, the emergence of a true AI Support Engineer could not have come at a better time.