The First Startup Was Not Decorative Backstory
While studying at Harvard, Jesse Zhang founded Lowkey, a product for recording and socially sharing gaming content. In 2021, Lowkey was acquired by Niantic, the developer of Pokémon Go. The transaction price was not disclosed, but the exit itself gave him a complete experience of a company's product, team, and transaction cycle.
This experience makes Decagon different from the typical story of a first startup becoming a unicorn. Zhang and co-founder Ashwin Sreenivas had both founded and exited companies; for their second company, they chose an enterprise problem with more direct commercial value but heavier execution requirements.
Why Customer Service
Customer service has several properties that suit an Agent: high task volume, abundant text and voice data, outcomes measurable through resolution rate and satisfaction, and the ability for an Agent to execute refunds, cancellations, and account changes through APIs rather than merely answer questions.
But that also means mistakes directly damage customer relationships. Decagon's product focus is therefore not just fluent language; it lets enterprises define processes, connect systems, test performance, and keep improving.
Valuation Is Not Revenue
Decagon completed its Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation in June 2025, then raised at a $4.5 billion valuation in January 2026. The company officially confirmed only that it grew from zero to eight-figure ARR in 2024; Forbes reported a more precise annualized-revenue figure in late 2025, but that figure has no public financial statements behind it, so the list metric uses the official range.
These three numbers represent financing prices at two points in time and an operating run rate; they must not be combined into “the company makes $4.5 billion in revenue.” What remains to watch is whether revenue growth can outpace integration and service costs as enterprise deployments expand.