Most businesses struggle less with AI itself than with missed calls, slow responses to late-night questions, and lost leads due to delayed follow-up. While companies like PolyAI, Sierra, and Bland AI have provided automation for years, smaller organisations often can’t access these tools.
Narwhal Labs, based in Bristol and founded in 2022 by Luke Sartain, has raised £20 million from UK investors. Backers include Jonathan Swann, a director at CFC Underwriting. Its goal is to change this situation.
Narwhal Labs’ product, DeepBlue OS, is an autonomous communications platform that can be set up in ten minutes, with no setup fees or long-term contracts. It offers enterprise-grade AI on a pay-as-you-go basis.
How DeepBlue OS works
DeepBlue OS uses three agents simultaneously across voice, SMS, email, and WhatsApp. The inbound agent answers calls, qualifies leads, and books appointments 24/7. The lead and case responder replies within two minutes to any new inquiry, form, or document request. The outbound agent handles high-volume calls and messages for follow-ups and re-engaging the pipeline.
“Think of DeepBlue OS as the operational layer that sits across every channel a business uses to communicate with customers and treats them as a single, unified workflow rather than separate systems,” Sartain explains to TFN.
When an inquiry comes in, the system understands the situation, decides what to do next, and handles it on its own. Businesses with thousands of daily inquiries get the same fast, consistent service at 3 am on Sunday as they do at 9 am on Monday.
Every decision the system makes can be reviewed, exported, and used as evidence. The organisations that need always-on communication the most, like financial services, insurance, healthcare, legal, and government, are also the ones that can’t risk compliance failures.
DeepBlue OS comes with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certifications, meets GDPR, TCPA, and OFCOM rules from the start, and supports over 50 languages without extra development.
What’s next
While PolyAI and Sierra focus on helping human teams, Narwhal takes a completely different approach.
“Most platforms are built around augmenting human teams, helping agents respond faster, routing conversations more efficiently, or surfacing information at the right moment. They still assume people are in the loop. DeepBlue OS is built on a different assumption: the entire process can be owned by the system,” Sartain says.
Narwhal isn’t trying to outspend the big enterprise players. Instead, it’s aiming for the large middle market that others have overlooked, and with £20 million, it believes it can reach them efficiently.
