UpHonest Capital Leads CA$3.2M Seed for Expertise AI
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Expertise AI has raised CA$3.2 million in a Seed round led by UpHonest Capital, with AMINO Capital, Welight Capital, UpScaleX, and AltaIR Capital participating. The money will help enterprises in traditional industries build AI fluency and deploy agents across sales and customer support.
The Toronto company is going after a specific failure mode. For businesses in logistics, utilities and energy, telecommunications, financial services, and manufacturing, buying access to AI is only the start. Without practical fluency, teams burn hours rewriting prompts and correcting outputs without building repeatable processes. Sharing proprietary knowledge without agreed rules creates a governance problem on top of the adoption problem.
Hao Sheng is the founder and CEO.
The agents themselves answer product questions, qualify inquiries, book meetings, route service requests, and update connected systems, with complex cases handed to a person along with the relevant context.
One published case study covers Circuit Electric, the public EV charging network run by Hydro-Québec, which recorded a 22.35% reduction in contact-form submissions among engaged website sessions, with measurable impact inside 60 days. The study also reports 557 customer contacts avoided in December 2024.
The delivery model is hands-on. Forward-deployed engineers work directly with customer teams to pick a valuable starting workflow, connect existing knowledge and systems, and define what an agent should know, which actions it can take, and when a person needs to step in. Performance gets measured against an agreed business metric and refined using real interactions.
On infrastructure, each customer gets a virtual private server for its agents and workflows. Customers pick their own models, including open-source and open-weight options, based on performance, cost, and operational needs. Unlimited-usage options make AI spending more predictable as adoption grows. Once an initial workflow proves out, its knowledge, integrations, and operating rules can be reused across other teams and use cases.
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