A support agent that would rather escalate than bluff.
AskRoo exists because merchants have been burned by chatbots that sound confident and get it wrong. The fix isn't a better-sounding bot. It's one that reads your live data and shows its source.
Why Australia first
An Australian evening is a US team's night.
When an Australian shopper asks where their order is at 9pm, the support teams that could answer are asleep on the other side of the world. Grounded automation matters more here, not less.
So we start local and do it properly: Australian English, returns language written to sit correctly alongside Australian Consumer Law, and data handled in an Australian region under the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles. There are over 120,000 live Shopify stores in Australia2 — this is a real market, not a test bed.
Why narrow
Better at a few things than mediocre at everything.
AskRoo is not a helpdesk. There's no SLA management, no macros, no multi-channel ticketing. It answers where-is-my-order, returns and product questions from live store data, escalates cleanly when it should, and sorts what's left in a lightweight inbox.
That narrowness is the point. WISMO alone is 30–50% of ecommerce support volume3 — and over half in peak. Automating a few high-volume jobs without ever inventing an answer is worth more than a broad tool that bluffs.
Where we are
Pre-launch, and honest about it.
AskRoo is pre-revenue and in a short build toward Shopify App Store submission. There are no customers to quote yet, so we don't. The numbers on this site are either sourced third-party market data or clearly-labelled targets we're building toward — never results we haven’t measured.
If that reads as cautious, good. A product whose entire pitch is that it doesn’t make things up shouldn’t make things up about itself.
Who's actually building this.
A small crew in Sydney — one founder, a couple of grown-ups keeping us honest, and interns who are better than they let on.
Basil Jilani
FounderBasil is doing his Business Analytics undergrad at Macquarie University and building AskRoo in the hours between lectures. He started it because he'd had enough of chatbots that answer confidently and get it wrong. Runs on flat whites and long arguments with Claude — he loses most of them, and the product is better for it.
Eo Jin “Ginny” Lee
Legal CounselGinny is a solicitor and a Macquarie University alum who keeps AskRoo's returns language on the right side of Australian Consumer Law. Early in her career and sharp with it — she reads the fine print so your shoppers never have to.
Emily Lee
People & CultureEmily runs people and culture, which mostly means she's the reason the team actually likes each other. Owns a sweet tooth the size of Sydney and bakes for every occasion, plus a few she invents. If something needs sorting, she's usually sorted it already.
Lachlan “Lachie” Dunne
Engineering internLachie ships features between surf checks and swears the best ideas come from the water. The commit history is skeptical, but the ideas are good, so nobody argues.
Angus Fletcher
Engineering internAngus debugs by staring at the problem until it feels awkward and confesses. Powered by meat pies and a level of confidence the code doesn't always earn — yet.
Matilda “Tilly” Ryan
Design internTilly can spot the pixel that's one off from across the room. Keeps a running list of small things that annoy her, which has quietly become our best backlog.
Answers your shoppers can check.
Join the Australian beta and put a grounded support agent in front of your shoppers — one that shows its source, or escalates instead of guessing.