How TruAgents Is Building AI-Native Engagement for Regulated Industries
Supporting the AI-Native Layer for Customer Engagement in Financial Services
Justin Murray and Albert Gutierrez
Replacing Templates With AI Agents That Personalize Every Email, Text, & Call
TruAgents, based in Hoboken, New Jersey, builds an AI platform that writes and sends every customer message individually across email, SMS, and phone, in more than 50 languages. Banks and insurers use it to run outbound campaigns and respond to inbound messages in their brand’s voice, with compliance checks built into every message.
Most engagement tools fill in a template. TruAgents replaces the template with a team of AI agents, each trained on a specific brand, including a copywriter, a compliance officer, an insights profiler, and a data analyst. The agents draft each message in real time, remember every past interaction, and adjust to the customer in front of them. Teams sync customer data through an API or CRM and keep control over drafting, review, and compliance rules.
Today, one application runs email, SMS, and calls, both outbound and inbound, with brand-specific email design and agent voices. TruAgents reports 450% higher engagement, 40% higher revenue, and 60% lower costs for customers. The company’s goal is to become the system of record for customer engagement.
TruAgents has raised a $4M seed round after bootstrapping to date, with participation from Manchester Story, Unum Ventures, and Plug and Play.
Why Is This Problem Significant, & How Large Is Its Impact?
Customers expect to be treated as individuals. McKinsey found that 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when they don’t get them. Enterprises continue to spend to meet that expectation. Marketing automation is projected to grow from $47.02B in 2025 to $81.01B by 2030, and the contact center software market was valued at $47.71B in 2025. Together, that is nearly $100B a year.
The spend buys volume. Emails go out from “no-reply” inboxes, so customers can’t reply. Phone calls follow rigid scripts. Every interaction starts from zero because the systems don’t carry context from one touchpoint to the next. The problem sits in the architecture of these tools, so adding more messages makes it worse. Regulated industries feel it most. Compliance rules make real-time personalization hard, so most teams fall back on generic templates.
Colonial Life showcases the cost. The insurer, a subsidiary of Unum, had strong voluntary benefits enrollment materials, but they went out as one-way, English-first communications. The company couldn’t see who received them, who read them, or who had questions, and compliance risk made automated follow-up hard to scale. Only 22% of eligible employees enrolled. The other 78% went without coverage for themselves and their families, often because a question went unanswered or the information never reached them in their own language.
After Colonial Life deployed TruAgents for personalized, multilingual outreach by email, SMS, and phone, with real-time compliance monitoring, its enrollment rate rose to 47%, a 114% increase. Across 88,000 communications, TruAgents handled more than 2,100 employee conversations independently. That volume shows how much demand went unmet before.
Existing platforms send messages and run call centers at scale, but they can’t deliver real-time, compliant, brand-true personalization across voice and text. That gap is where TruAgents enters.
Meet the Team Behind TruAgents
The founding team behind TruAgents has years of hands-on expertise in analytics, customer engagement, and financial services.
Majd Maksad, co-founder & CEO: Majd co-founded Status Money and served as its CEO. NerdWallet and Capital One now license its intellectual property. Before that, he spent more than a decade at Citi, where he served as Head of Analytics for Global Digital Payments and Digital Customer Engagement. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering and Economics and a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University.
Korash Hernandez, co-founder & COO: Korash co-founded Status Money and has 23+ years of experience in machine learning, analytics, and operations. Korash led Digital Marketing Analytics at Citi Cards, ran Credit Risk Modeling at T-Mobile, and was the 8th hire at Marcus by Goldman Sachs. Majd and Korash also co-built Status Money.
Co-Founder & CEO
“Customers don’t think in campaigns or channels, they think in conversations and relationships. That’s what drives trust, engagement, and ultimately revenue. We’re building the customer operating system, one platform that runs every interaction across email, SMS, and phone, remembers every customer relationship, and engages each person one-on-one at scale, with the compliance required for regulated industries.”
Why We’re Excited to Invest
We met Majd and Korash through their work at Status Money, then reconnected with them at an HSBC event during NY Tech Week. The conversation turned to NJ FAST, our New Jersey program focused on insurance carriers, and it was clear TruAgents fit the model.
TruAgents sits at the system layer of the industry. It replaces the stack of separate email, SMS, and call tools with one platform that remembers each customer and writes each message from scratch. That position lets it compete for budget in both marketing automation and contact center software.
The team signal is strong. Majd and Korash ran customer analytics and digital engagement at Citi and co-founded Status Money, whose technology is now licensed by NerdWallet and Capital One. They’ve lived the problem inside large financial institutions, and they know what compliance teams will approve based on past experience.
The traction confirmed our conviction. Unum, one of the largest insurers in the U.S., deployed TruAgents, and the results from Colonial Life show that the product meets the compliance and operational bar set by large financial institutions. Customers are tired of generic, spam-like messages from big companies, and TruAgents gives enterprises a way to answer that.
Beyond capital, Plug and Play brings TruAgents introductions to insurance carriers, banks, and other corporates in our network.
Plug and Play is one of the most active VCs globally. Our goal is to fund the teams building the defensible businesses of the future. Join our ecosystem today.
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