Investing in Pylon

Excellence in managing customer relationships post-sale has become a source of competitive differentiation for B2B companies in the last decade. Retention rates and expansions are directly correlated to the health of a business, so companies are making sure customers are continuously delighted with the product experience. Some are even putting more resources into these things than into the initial sale.

However, the existing tools are often half-measures or ill-fitted support channels optimized for consumer products, not B2B. When it comes to SaaS apps that involve team-wide change management, or technical products that rely on tight integrations and bespoke onboarding processes, those solutions quickly fall short. 

That’s why we saw tens of thousands of teams adopting Slack, Teams, and Discord as their primary communication medium, and creating shared channels with each customer. The end user experience is just better, especially for larger accounts: customers can stay within their existing communication tools and get questions answered instantly; it’s easy to pull in other teammates to address specific questions; and Slack comes with rich media support for things like code snippets, screenshots, and emojis. 

It seems to be an ideal solution — until the number of channels increases dramatically and there’s no easy way to prioritize conversations among the team or create SLAs. However, after talking to numerous support leaders experiencing these challenges, we believe the right platform needs a way to provide not only a single pane of glass for all the interactions, but also create separations and route conversations based on urgency and custom conditions. 

When we saw the Pylon product last summer, we sensed the early makings of such a solution. It provides a single view for customer-facing teams to see all their customer issues, regardless of where they are happening — Slack, Teams, chat widget, ticket forms, or emails. It understands the nature of the messages and can recognize when new messages are related to an existing issue or a new issue, or are not about issues at all. It is also able to automatically tag issues based on customer tiers, support plans, and past exchanges, and to send new context to Jira or Linear. All of this wouldn’t be possible without a very powerful workflow engine that is deeply connected with existing systems.

The Pylon founders — Marty Kausas, Robert Eng, and Advith Chelikani — had deeply studied the pain points of the market and went through numerous iterations to make Pylon the omni-channel support system it is today. It’s already used by hundreds of startups and enterprises, including Deel, Hightouch, Anyscale,and Sardine. Pylon has ambitious plans to become an end-to-end customer system of record for fast-growing B2B businesses, from pre-sales to post-sales, so they can deliver the best-in-class customer experience without sacrificing operational efficiency.

Having known the three Pylon founders over the years, we were impressed by their incredibly sharp product instincts and customer obsession. Combined with their dedication and grit, we have the utmost confidence that they’ll be able to execute and deliver on this vision. We’re excited to be partnering with Marty, Robert, Advith, and the entire Pylon team in the Series A, and to open up the new chapter for B2B customer journey!