The most successful tech companies of the last decade share a key trait: they solved emerging problems during periods of market disruption. Atlassian rode the wave of agile software development. Figma broke out as design became a strategic imperative. Snowflake surged with the shift from on-prem data warehouses to cloud-native data platforms. Stripe scaled with the explosion of digital commerce and demand for developer-friendly payments. Zoom became ubiquitous during the remote work boom. Iconic companies emerge at the intersection of early insight and fortuitous timing.

In 2022, while working as software engineers in San Francisco after undergrad, friends Marty, Robert, and Advith saw early signs of disruption in customer support workflows. Across the ecosystem, B2B support was shifting from static email threads to real-time, chat-based channels like Slack and Microsoft Teams. Legacy customer support software was not designed for conversation-based support and resulted in clunky workflows, creating a need for a new tool to ingest and organize conversation data. At the same time, Zendesk, the incumbent leader, was taken private, slowing innovation.

Marty, Robert, and Advith recognized that real-time, chat-based support was becoming the new standard, and the trio founded Pylon to enable it. Just weeks later, ChatGPT launched, catalyzing a second disruption and unlocking a new foundation for AI-powered conversational support.

Pylon emerged at the convergence of a channel shift in B2B support and a generational breakthrough in AI. Three years later, Pylon is reinventing B2B customer support to be conversational and AI-first.

Shifting from email to real-time support

The current shift toward real-time B2B support is the latest step in the evolution toward faster, better support. Customer support has evolved in response to technological developments over time, from ad-hoc, in-person interactions to telephone calls and call centers, eventually to email, voicebot, and chatbot. With each wave, customers have come to expect more flexible, immediate support.

The release of Slack (2013) and Teams (2017), followed by their widespread adoption, catalyzed the latest channel expansion in B2B customer support. These platforms created shared spaces where support teams could embed directly into customer workflows, driving stronger engagement and retention. When a support agent joins a shared Slack channel with a customer, the customer feels as if the agent is part of his team. As one support leader put it: “Email doesn’t get the same engagement – when we pull up CSAT, we can see that Slack is actually a competitive differentiator.” Realizing this power, many B2B teams began setting up shared Slack and Teams channels for their most valuable enterprise customers.

While support leaders embraced Slack and Teams as their most strategic support channels, they struggled to scale them. Legacy support tools did not ingest these channels natively. Agents who managed these channels were afraid to go to lunch, let alone vacation, fearing they would miss urgent issues. Agents struggled to keep track of high volumes of messages spread across many customer chats and were frustrated by having to work across multiple platforms.

Even when incumbent tools began ingesting Slack and Teams, typically via a third-party connector, issues arose. Legacy tools built for email struggled with the nuance of chat. They failed to determine where multiple messages pertained to the same issue or mistook a ‘thumbs up’ emoji intended to acknowledge a message for a reply or resolution, resulting in SLA violations.

Marty, Advith, and Robert’s insight in founding Pylon was that real-time support was a significant and enduring trend, and that existing support platforms were not evolving to meet the moment.

Hacking customer support

Advith and Robert met as undergrads at Caltech, where they co-led Hacktech, a major intercollegiate hackathon. They connected with Marty through a summer engineering fellowship in San Francisco during college and quickly formed a high-trust, high-velocity trio.

Marty, Advith, and Robert combine ruthless efficiency, scrappy resourcefulness and intense ambition. They electric scooter to and from the office, half a block from where they live, to save time. For the entirety of Pylon’s history, they have been its lowest-paid employees. Early on, they saved money on gym memberships by treating an early employee’s gym key as a collective company resource. They chose their office location in part because of its proximity to the CalTrain, so that they could effectively use the building exterior as a free, highly visible billboard. They share an obsession with the Pylon product and fixation on building a consequential company. The three display a unique level of trust and mutual understanding that come from years of working and traveling together.

In YC, the founders’ vision for Pylon was clear and targeted: solve Slack management for B2B support teams. To accomplish this, they built a Connector product that integrates Slack and Teams messages into existing ticketing systems, allowing agents to manage all channels as tickets in a single pane of glass. Market reception to this wedge product was immediate and positive – Pylon’s value was apparent to B2B support teams, for whom Slack and Teams management was an intensifying pain point.

Pylon quickly established itself as the de facto tool for Slack and Teams integration. Before long, it began to feel pull from customers to expand more deeply into customer support workflows and to broaden to support other teams. Multiple factors drove this organic demand. Customers loved Pylon’s intuitive UI/UX, appreciated its rapid product velocity and valued its laser focus on B2B support, in contrast to existing support tools that focused on B2C and treated B2B as an afterthought.

Following organic demand within support, Pylon evolved its product from a Slack management add-on to a full-featured support platform. As it built out a robust ticketing system and unified inbox, Pylon began displacing incumbent support platforms at increasingly large accounts. While incumbent platforms are well-established in the market, Pylon gained ground on the strength of tangible product advantages, including its Slack and Teams orchestration, but also advanced ticketing and routing, faster implementation, and unique, B2B-specific AI features.

Turning conversations into a company-wide advantage

Today, companies like Temporal, Assembly AI, Honeycomb and Lumos use Pylon as their core support platform. Users uniformly describe Pylon as a mission-critical tool that is deeply ingrained in their support operations, with many noting that it organically spreads across teams and workflows. Customers are excited about Pylon’s AI including AI Knowledge Management, Account Intelligence, AI Autofill, AI Triggers and AI Agents, that keep documentation up to date, accelerate response drafting, complete ticket pre-work, generate customer signals, summarize account context and deflect basic, repetitive issues. They view Pylon as a tool that will scale with them and hope to increase users and use cases over time.

Pylon’s founders have also recognized the opportunity to leverage conversational data for the benefit of the whole company beyond support. Its strategic position at the point of data ingestion gives Pylon a unique view into post-sale customer interactions that have implications for all customer-facing teams, including customer success, solutions, professional services, account managers and more. This turns Pylon into much more than a traditional ticketing system.

With the recent launch of Account Intelligence, Pylon allows teams to transform their unstructured conversational data into actionable signals. This enables not just a reactive way of managing customers, but a proactive way to understand who to focus on. Teams can both query individual account data to understand who to upsell, prepare for meetings, discover high-risk accounts, or gauge customer health, and also ask questions across all account data to understand common pain points, evolving sentiment and more.

Account Intelligence is just the start. With its core data model and AI-first architecture, we believe Pylon is poised to unify the fragmented world of post-sales customer ops – support, success, onboarding, implementation and more – onto a single platform. Along the way, as it refines and ships incremental AI features, Pylon will abstract away low value support activities, allowing B2B support teams to engage with customers more personally and strategically.

We are proud to partner with Marty, Advith and Robert as they build the AI-powered operating system for post-sales engagement and redefine B2B support.