Ada, a Toronto company that builds AI agents for customer service, is combining with Dialpad, a privately held business communications and contact centre software company based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The two companies announced the deal on November 4, 2026, a day after The Globe and Mail first reported it. Dialpad is the larger party, and its co-founder and chief executive, Craig Walker, will lead the combined business.
The companies did not disclose financial terms. The Globe and Mail, citing two unnamed sources, reported that it was an all-share deal valuing Ada at around C$600 million (about US$430 million). That figure has not been confirmed by either company, and it is well below the US$1.2 billion valuation Ada was reported to have reached in 2021. The deal had not closed as of November 5; the companies said they expected it to close on or about November 12.
Ada's co-founder and chief executive, Mike Murchison, becomes chief AI officer of the merged company. Mike Gozzo becomes senior vice president of AI product and engineering, reporting to Murchison. The companies said customers of both businesses would keep their current contracts, pricing, account teams and support channels, and that existing integrations would keep working as configured.
What Ada built
Murchison and David Hariri started Ada in 2016, after an earlier social media startup, The Globe and Mail reported. Its first product let businesses build their own customer service chatbots, which at first ran on detailed prewritten scripts. BetaKit reported in 2020 that the founding team had spent more than a year working in customer support before building the product.
After ChatGPT launched in late 2022, Ada rebuilt its technology on large language models, and in April 2023 it added voice agents that take customer service calls, according to The Globe. Its agents can connect to a client's other software to carry out tasks such as changing a booking, updating contact details or issuing a refund. The company now describes its product as an agentic customer experience platform for building, running and improving AI agents.
According to the announcement, Ada has put more than 500 AI agents into production across voice, messaging, email and social channels in more than 130 languages. Opus Research, an analyst firm briefed on the deal, said those agents run for more than 350 customers, among them Ancestry, GoFundMe, Pinterest and Barnes & Noble. The Globe reported that Ada had recently been running at about US$50 million in annual revenue, citing two sources, and that revenue from its older chatbot products had fallen quickly while the newer offering grew.
“We're bringing our companies together to change what customers can expect from a business.”
Why the companies are combining
Dialpad was founded in 2011 by members of the Google Voice team, according to Ada's post on X. It sells AI-powered calling, contact centre and sales engagement software, runs its own global voice network and speech models, and says it serves more than 50,000 businesses. Its investors include Andreessen Horowitz, GV, SoftBank, ICONIQ Capital and Salesforce Ventures, The Globe reported.
Opus Research said Ada's agents had previously handed calls to a third-party contact centre vendor, a link Murchison described as a brittle handoff. In the combined business, Ada's agents will run on Dialpad's own carrier network and speech models. The companies said customer service is the starting point, and that they plan to extend the platform into sales and other work tied to customer relationships.
Opus described a go-to-market plan that starts by offering Ada's agents to about 3,600 mid-market and enterprise Dialpad accounts that fit Ada's target profile, then selling through Dialpad's channel partners, and later introducing Dialpad to Ada's own enterprise customers. Opus put the pro forma, unaudited combined annual recurring revenue at more than $470 million as of July 31, 2026, including more than $50 million from AI agents.
The founders and the funding
Ada raised a C$63.7 million (about US$44 million) Series B led by Accel in March 2020, with Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark, Version One, Leaders Fund and Burst Capital taking part, BetaKit reported. In May 2021 it raised a US$130 million Series C led by Spark Capital, with Tiger Global joining, at a reported valuation of US$1.2 billion. That round brought its total funding to US$200 million.
The years since have been harder. Ada cut 78 jobs, or 16% of its staff, in September 2022, BetaKit reported. The Globe said the company eliminated half its marketing team in July 2026 and laid off 25 more people in late October, leaving it with roughly 200 employees. Hariri left in July for a product management role at Shopify but remains on Ada's board, according to The Globe, and the company's chief marketing officer and chief customer officer also left this year.
BetaKit noted that Ada faces better-funded rivals such as Decagon and Sierra, and that Canadian tech companies that raised money at peak valuations have struggled to grow into them. Allen Lau, the Wattpad co-founder whose firm Two Small Fish Ventures was an early Ada investor, wrote on X that building a startup is never a straight line.
What happens to customers
In a letter to customers, Murchison said Ada customers do not need to take any action, that their current deployments, agreements and data commitments stay in place, and that the platform will stay open to the business systems they already use. He said customers should expect faster and more reliable voice over Dialpad's network, shared workspaces for human staff and AI agents, and tools such as real-time guidance and automated quality checks for human agents.
The companies said they would share more roadmap details in the coming months. They did not say whether the Ada brand will remain; the announcement points readers to a Dialpad web page.
The deal adds to consolidation in AI customer service software. CMSWire noted that NiCE closed its roughly $955 million purchase of Cognigy in September 2025. Dialpad was advised by Gunderson Dettmer and Stikeman Elliott, and Ada by Axom Partners and Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt.
