As email has become an increasingly clogged communication mechanism, companies seeking more direct ways to communicate with their customers in a B2B context are turning to Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord and other channels. But it’s a challenge for companies to follow those conversations and make sure they get to the right people.
That’s true Pylonan early stage startup, comes in. It helps businesses manage, prioritize, and route messages from these channels to the right people, and it even works with tools like Zendesk to create tickets when it makes sense.
Today, Pylon announced a $3.2 million seed investment. So was the company, which launched in November a member of the Winter 2023 Y Combinator cohort.
Company co-founder Marty Kausas says he and his co-founders, Robert Eng and Advith Chelikani, began observing in their previous jobs that companies were increasingly moving B2B conversations from email to Slack for more direct and personal discussions. At the same time, they saw that their companies struggled to manage these conversations.
“Imagine that I am a support worker, or that I am a salesman trying to arrange everything [these conversations]. There’s no way to track anything in Slack. And so Pylon comes in, and is essentially the data unlock tool for all of your customer conversations that happen through chat tools,” Kausas told JS.
For starters, the company supports Slack as it needs to manage most external calls, but plans to start layering on Microsoft Teams and other channels in the near future.
Pylon can’t access internal business conversations because it can’t read DMs and can only access the channels you identify as a customer for monitoring. According to Kausas, an early customer, Hightouch, uses Pylon to monitor more than 300 shared customer channels.
The company closed the financing deal in March and has since added two employees for a total of five, including the founders, with plans to reach nearly 10 by the end of the year. They plan to add several more engineering and business development positions in the coming months. He says diversity is definitely a focus and the company is looking for the best people it can find to fill every open position.
Despite launching in a period of economic uncertainty, Kausas is confident that his company can succeed because he solves a real problem customers have in tracking this type of activity. In fact, he reports that his company is already making money despite being only about 8 months old.
“So the good news is that we are making money and we have customers who are happy and paying. So right now we’re not actually burning anything,” he said.
The current $3.2 million seed investment was led by General Catalyst with participation from Y Combinator, Horizon VC, Airangels and CC.