Last year Pylon, an early San Francisco startup, was just trying to build its product and bring it to market with a fresh $3.2 million seed investment in its pockets. That product involved helping companies track, manage and route B2B customer conversations in channels like Slack, Microsoft Teams and Discord.
What the company learned, however, was that this approach wasn’t enough in the B2B market. Over the last year, it has expanded the mission to include features like ticketing, chatbots and traditional channels like email to begin building a platform of customer communication services.
Customers seem to be buying into this approach, and the company announced a $17 million Series A on Wednesday.
Marty Kausas, Pylon’s CEO and co-founder, says they quickly learned that the omnichannel approach the company originally took was just a first step, and customers were clamoring for more.
“When we last spoke, we were just starting to bud as a support tool, and so we primarily had identified that enterprises were starting to talk to their [business] customers over shared Slack channels and Microsoft Teams instead of email,” Kausas told TechCrunch.
“But that evolved into realizing, hey, it’s not just this omnichannel thing that’s a problem. There’s actually a bigger opportunity to unify everything that B2B teams need. And omnichannel monitoring was just one piece of that.”
For some time, the trend in business was to buy the best-of-breed SaaS available, but over time that has become a management headache for IT. Businesses are looking increasingly for a single vendor to handle everything.
“But it turns out that most of these companies were buying a ticketing system like Zendesk, a customer success platform like Gainsight. They’re buying AI support bots. They’re buying separate knowledge base products — and it turns out they should be all part of one tool,” he said.
Kausas says his team went to work adding these pieces, and while he admits their initial efforts probably don’t match these products that have been on the market for years, it is helping bring in customers that don’t want to deal with maintaining all these tools. He says the company will improve its offerings over time.
The approach seems to be working. Pylon went from a handful of early customers last year to around 250 today. It grew from five people last year to 14 currently — and it’s hiring for a number of open positions.
He says that one thing he’s doing differently from a lot of startups today is a fully in-office experience for his employees. He rented a space in San Francisco (next door to the original TechCrunch offices, as a matter of fact) with room to expand to 100 employees. He is requiring that his employees work in the office, and he says, so far at least, candidates have been attracted to working in an office again. “One thing I’ll mention, I think a lot of companies these days are trying to go remote. One thing that’s unique about us is we’re fully in-person,” he said.
The $17 million investment was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from existing investors General Catalyst, Y Combinator and other unnamed angels. The company has now raised more than $20 million.