Vertigo

The problem

Support agents answer the same questions every day, and most AI tools forget what they learned the moment a ticket closes. Companies deploy chatbots that work in demos but frustrate customers with generic answers, while human agents keep solving the same problems from scratch. The knowledge needed to resolve most tickets exists inside past conversations, but almost no system learns from it continuously.

Why now

Customer support has been an early target for automation, but first-generation chatbots disappointed customers and agents alike. Modern language models can now understand nuanced questions, while agent frameworks make it possible for systems to take actions and learn from feedback. Support volumes are growing as companies sell more digital products, and hiring enough skilled agents is increasingly difficult. Companies want automation that genuinely resolves problems rather than deflecting them. Vertigo emerged at the moment when the technology could deliver on that promise and buyers were ready to trust it.

The founders

Chloe Martin ran support at a payments company, where she built a team that handled millions of tickets every year. Arjun Mehta built agent frameworks and believed the next wave of AI would be defined by systems that improve on the job, not just models that answer once. They met through a founder community in Toronto and started building after Chloe described the frustration of watching her best agents leave, taking years of knowledge with them.

Why we invested

Aria backed Vertigo at pre-seed because its agents learned from every resolved ticket and knew when to hand off to a human. That second part mattered as much as the first: customers trusted the product because it didn’t pretend to know everything. Early pilots showed resolution rates improving week after week without additional configuration. Aria saw a team that understood both the technology and the human side of support, and she wanted to back them before the category became crowded.

How we helped

We helped Vertigo find its first enterprise customers through introductions to support leaders across our portfolio and network. Aria worked closely with Chloe on positioning, emphasising measurable resolution rates rather than vague automation promises. Our team also supported security and compliance work that opened doors to larger companies, and helped the founders hire an experienced head of customer success.

Where they are now

Vertigo now resolves a majority of first-line tickets for its customers, and its agents get measurably better every week without a team of prompt engineers. Customers report shorter response times, happier support teams and lower costs per ticket. The company recently launched tools that help human agents review and correct AI answers, feeding those corrections back into the system. Chloe still answers a few support tickets herself every month.