From No Idea to a $25M Raised in 3 Years | Mark Hughes co-founder Solidroad

We believe that the future is hybrid, that it is human agents and AI agents.

How does an AI-supported founder work in 2026?

It's not like we got in on our first attempt. Like, we got into YC on our fifth or sixth attempt.

What's the biggest mistake you've made in the last three years?

I think not hiring people quickly enough. In an AI world where there's a lot of AI slop and Zoom fatigue, that in-person sales is gonna outperform and continue to outperform virtual sales.

Mark, welcome to the pod.

Thank you very much for having me.

You literally have flown in just for this. I feel special.

[laughs] Yeah, exactly. Just for this.

It is just for this, right?

Yeah. I-- Also, we have a growing Dublin office, so I have to shout out the team in Dublin as well that I'm seeing a lot of people for the first time. So that office, last time I was here, there was three people. There's now 12, so lots of new faces.

Oof. Okay. What do you do?

I'm the co-founder and CEO of Solid Road. We are an AI-first training and quality assurance platform for enterprise customer experience teams, which sounds like a lot of waffles. So to kind of give it the simplified version-

You read my mind.

[laughs] When you call, uh, a customer support line or a call center, and they say, "This call is being recorded for training and quality purposes," historically, that was very laborious, where you'd have humans doing classroom-based learning with contact center agents and manually reviewing conversation transcripts with a scoring rubric to make sure people were following the right process. So we built AI agents to automate that.

Okay. Makes a lot more sense.

Yeah.

[laughs] Uh, okay. That's-- You've, yeah, you've kind of preempted my next question. That makes a lot of sense 'cause you often... Kinda one of those things you hear all the time but never really think why.

What happens with that?

Is it only if someone, like, is like, "I'm not happy with the service. Can I get a transcript? I said this. I said I need to cancel my broadband six months ago"? I've heard of cases like that where they've pulled the transcript and go, "Oh, yeah, you did cancel it."

Mm-hmm.

So that, that data is all used for training.

Yeah, exactly. So, uh, well, it should be. It's not. And, like, up until now-

Mm

... for quality assurance in particular, um, companies would audit maybe 1% of total conversation volume, so-

Okay

... that's all they're looking at. So yeah, there's lots of, uh, oversight that's missing from the other 99% of conversations.

Okay. And give, give listeners a kind of s- context of where you're at as a company. So when did you start, and where are we now?

Yeah. So we founded the business in Dublin in early 2023. Uh, it was very much like myself and my co-founder, Mark and Patrick Inc. We have a memo about it, but kind of just wanted to work together. We didn't really have a clear idea what kind of business we want to build. We were both second-time founders. Um, kind of, uh, got the first product to market maybe later that year. Um, and then we started kind of having our kind of inflection point in, in 2024, and that's when we were, uh, accepted into Y Combinator. We did Y Combinator early 2025, and we raised our