Pylon

Building the next generation support platform, built for B2B companies.

Backed by a16z, General Catalyst, Y Combinator

Customer Support, also Co-Founder & CEO

Andreessen Horowitz

Investing both personally and most recently through a16z's scout fund.

Angel Investor

Airbnb

Software Engineer

Clipboard Health

Freelanced at Clipboard while working at Airbnb for fun.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Engineering Fellow

Purdue Hackers

President

BoilerMake

Hackathon Organizer

Purdue University

Undergraduate Lecturer CS 190: Tools and Resources

Undergraduate Lecturer CS 490: iOS Development in Swift

Yelp

Software Engineering Intern

Qualcomm

Building the Zendesk Killer.

Pylon is the next-generation support platform, optimized for B2B companies.

Backed by a16z, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator.

Announcing Pylon's Series B led by a16z and BCV.

Since starting the company 2.6 years ago, 780+ of the fastest growing companies including Together AI, Cognition, and Temporal have chosen to scale their customer support on Pylon.

Over 150 migrated from products like Zendesk, Intercom, and others.

Why?

We're the first support platform built for B2B. 

Since our inception, we’ve expanded beyond ticketing to meet the needs of the entire B2B post-sales team. Their customer operations are more complex across…

→ Teams (not just support, but success, solutions, ...)
→ Channels (not just email, but Slack, Teams, Discord)
→ Context (not just tickets, but call recordings and conversations)
→ AI (not just deflection, heavy focus on internal workflows)
→ Relationships (not just transactional)
→ Signals (from more data sources)

With Pylon, you can pull all of your customer data and workflows into one intelligent B2B support platform.


— What about AI? —

In order to create useful AI in B2B, you need to gather as much customer context as possible. Pylon is quickly becoming the source of truth for all customer data, allowing us to layer in a suite of agentic and assistant products on top to help your team move much, much faster.

We've released three AI products so far...

1/ AI Agents (reduce ticket work by 50%)
2/ AI Assistants (move up to 3x faster within Pylon)
3/ Account Intelligence (create actionable AI signals)

The future of B2B support is integrated, actionable and AI-native. 
The future of B2B support is Pylon.


— Thank you —

Advith, Robert, the Pylon team, and I are so grateful for your continued support.

We’d like to thank our Series B co-leads…

Jennifer Li from Andreessen Horowitz
Merritt Hummer and Abby Meyers from Bain Capital Ventures

Our ongoing investors...

Niko Bonatsos from General Catalyst
Harj Taggar from Y Combinator

Our past investors...

David Ongchoco, Adarsh Bhatt from Comma Capital
Sandy Kory from Horizon


— What's next? —

We have MANY open roles across Sales, Marketing, Support, Engineering, Design.

Learn more about the fundraise and our future (link to exclusive in comments).

Marty Kausas

"First you build the product"
"Then you build the team" ← We're here
"Finally you build the company" ← Also starting to feel this

I'm so Fing proud of the Pylon team.

Everyone is working really hard. 

Thank you all 🫶

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We're spending $150k on our Hawaii offsite.

The team deserves every penny.

Everyone has been working extremely hard and there's a lot to celebrate...

1/ 800+ B2B customers
2/ Incredible customer love
3/ Non-stop launches
4/ Working weekends
5/ No missed revenue goals
6/ Raised Series B
7/ Team has grown 2.75x this year 

Best-in-class performance deserves best-in-class rewards.

And the team has hit every goal 🙌 

--

The offsite will include...

1/ The ENTIRE TEAM! No one is excluded.

2/ Staying at one hotel together.

3/ Team bonding dinners.

4/ Misc activities (choice of ATV ride, parasailing, snorkeling with turtles)

--

Will we be working? Absolutely.

Customer-facing teams will be working their normal Pacific Time hours and there will be company targets and projects we want each team to hit while in Hawaii.

THANK YOU for an incredible August. Some notable wins:
1/ Raised a Series B
2/ Smashed growth target
3/ Launched Account Intelligence
4/ Team grew 20%

We're working as hard as we can to build absolute best customer support platform. 


Customer love...

WE LOVE PYLON!!!!!!!! LET'S GOOO!!!!!!!

OMG LETS GO PYLON!!!!!!!!!!

I just wanted to say we love PYLON so much. Thanks for being such a fantastic product!!! Pylon has completely revolutionized the way we manage support and customer conversations. It's been a game-changer in helping our team provide faster, more consistent, and higher-quality responses, without losing the personal touch. Plus the integration with Slack is a game changer!!!! Congrats team!

You fully wrecked the LinkedIn algorithm – Google AI is recommending your post as a news update!!!! HUGE CONGRATS 🎉🎈🎊

Pylon is the best choice I've seen so far for B2B support. It's modern, it's clean, and its AI capabilities are growing fast.

You're building a real deal differentiator, and I love that I have the privilege to work so closely with your software every day ❤️

Pylon is one of my fave products ever, and I love the whole journey!

I recommend Pylon every possible chance I get

Crushing it!!!! Please kill Zendesk

Hat's off on this software guys. What you have here is GOLD

Really easy tool for tracking all my accounts/opportunities while making it easy to collaborate! Also the bot responses are amazing.

We love Pylon!! So nice to have all of the issues in one place and to be able to automate around certain scenarios so easily.

we've been onboarding more engineers to Pylon & they've loved the experience. really impressed with how clean + powerful the product is!

You guys are crushing it an inspirational as a team, we're happy Pylon customers

We just did a demo with Pylon. It was one of the best demos I've had in a while.

You guys are the best part of my day, thank you so much

how cool! pylon team just keeps pumping out features 🔥 can't wait to try it out

awesome product, awesomer team. very excited to see what's next!

We're all pumped about Pylon across the board.

loving the product!!!

This is exciting!

so sick

This is pretty dope

Im a big fan of pylon

Stephanie Palazzolo from The Information wrote a piece about our Series B! Thank you for covering the story and highlighting Pylon's focus on B2B, being fully AI-native, and how we have the industry's best NRR (158%) and GRR (94%).

If you're a B2B company on Zendesk, Intercom, or Salesforce Service Cloud, we can help you scale more efficiently, reduce the need for custom apps and integrations, and give you the fastest time-to-value of any support platform.


Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/gXZ-q4CP

Business Insider just wrote about our offsite philosophy. We want to attract the best of the best talent and we'll do anything to make it happen. Last year we flew the entire team to South Korea and this week we're in Hawaii. 

If you want to build a generational company, join us.

Jobs page: https://lnkd.in/gmcYnSnd

Honored that Pylon is on the IA 40 list by Madrona! 

Fun fact: Over 50% of this year's list are Pylon customers ☺️ 

The list features "the top private companies building with and enabling AI & GenAI that will shape our future"

Onwards 🚀 

Full list here:
https://lnkd.in/g2SMhch2

Introducing Pylon's new website!

My 3 favorite parts are:

1. "Migrated from" logo wall on the homepage
2. Scales for multi-product
3. Implements Pylon's new brand kit

--

We had built our previous website 20 months ago.

Back then we had one core value prop: omnichannel support (for Slack and MS Teams).

Today we have four different product lines....
→ Core support platform
→ AI Agents
→ AI Assistants
→ Account Intelligence

The website needed to scale for multi-product.

So we worked with Slope on the rebrand starting earlier this year and wrapped up last week, just in time for our Series B announcement. 

Our design team (Wendy, Oliver, and Ben) plus our PMM Yoona spent months working on this in conjunction with their other responsibilities to get this right and Tom handled all the backend infrastructure and DNS migration. 

Some other big changes we introduced include...

- New visual identity that feels more mature and professional. Less startup-y, more enterprise-ready.

- Completely new site structure with dedicated pages for our main product lines: Core Platform, AI Knowledge Management, Account Intelligence, AI Agents, and AI Assistants.

- Product animations, mixed with static images, to actually show how Pylon works for complex B2B workflows.

- Interactive pricing page with all our SKUs and specific features.

The old site was designed when we were figuring out what to build.
The new one shows what we actually are: a complete AI-native B2B support platform.

B2B Support = Pylon. 

Check out the new site → usepylon.com

Advith and Robert are the best co-founders I could ask for.

Part of what's made our relationship great is we're aligned on some of the most important high level details of the company:

WHAT - Build a generational company ($10B in 10 years)
HOW - Grindy, low-ego, best idea wins, hire similar people
WHY - Building a startup is the most exciting way to spend time 

This alignment has made decision making incredibly easy.

-- 

Before starting Pylon we were friends.

1/ Advith and Robert met first at Caltech where they were both studying computer science, organizing HackTech (Caltech's hackathon), and competing at puzzle hunts together.

2/ I met Advith through the Kleiner Perkins fellowship (a program for college students who are interested in building startups). Robert had gone through the same program just one year earlier.

3/ After graduation Advith and I lived together for 3 years and became incredibly close.

4/ During the pandemic Advith later started living with Robert and started exploring startup ideas together. I had already been in pivot hell working with others.

4/ A year later Advith, Robert, and I came together and joined forces, and lived together.

--

We're still incredibly close and I rarely see others with similar amounts of trust and closeness.

Everyone keeps asking me: "What's changed since raising your Series B?"

Well...

In reality not that much.

We're still focused on building a...
✔️ great product
✔️ world-class team
✔️ generational company

We've tweaked...
➕️ perception from prospects/customers/employees
➕️ burn (OK with burning more to grow faster)
➕️ offering a small % of liquidity to early employees during the round 

Onwards!

We scaled from 14 to 55 people in one year without everything falling apart. 

I'm sharing exactly how on September 18th.

Most startups hit 30+ people and a lot things break. Everything lives in someone's head.  Simple questions turn into 20-person Slack threads. Product updates get lost in translation between teams.

We knew this was coming, so we focused on systems early.

Our product roadmap actually talks to the rest of our operations. When we ship a feature...

→ Marketing knows what and how to plan 
→ Sales knows what to demo
→ Support knows how to help customers 
→ New hires learn product knowledge quickly 

... so that we can move just as fast with 55 people.

I'll be sharing our exact process alongside Karan Goel, CEO of Cartesia at Make with Notion. 

If you're scaling a company and want to avoid operational chaos, come learn how we did it 👋🏻

As part of our Series B, we allowed our team to sell up to 10% of their vested equity in secondaries to investors. This is isn't standard, so why did we do it?

Startups are a long-term game and not everyone will be able to wait until an IPO.

And also most equity never turns into cash long-term (see note below).

So we decided as part of our Series B to include a tender offer to employees.

We allowed our team to sell up to 10% of their vested equity.


-- Notes --

- "Is Series B too early for secondaries?" It's up to the leverage you have as a company when engaging with investors. The more they want to put in, the more a tender offer becomes possible.

- "Won't this de-incentivize employees?" We felt that selling 10% of vested equity isn't enough to remove incentive.

- "Why does most equity never turn into cash?" Companies die, markets are capped, or the founders don't prioritize building a generational company.

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