Inner buyer assist platforms are shifting from platforms like e-mail ticketing programs and chat to channels like Slack, Microsoft Groups, and even Discord. However with Slack, as an illustration, in a position to host a whole lot of channels, the entire thing can turn out to be fairly unwieldy.
Plain, out of the UK, thinks it has the reply. Its API-first platform consolidates all these communication channels, permitting companies to streamline their assist.
“It means you may actually discuss to your prospects wherever they’re,” CEO Simon Rohrbach advised TechCrunch over a name.
It may additionally do chat and e-mail in the identical means {that a} conventional Assist Desk will, resembling ZenDesk or Intercom, but additionally energy Slack, Microsoft Groups, or Discord through one UI.
“It’s simply actually quick to make use of. Folks actually love utilizing it, and it has all the standard assist performance, metrics round SLAs, response instances, and so forth,” mentioned Rohrbach.
“We see this large shift taking place from assist being actually siloed, to assist working along with buyer success and engineering and all the opposite groups actually intently. And we energy that inside collaboration as effectively,” he added.
The startup has now raised $15 million in a Sequence A funding spherical led by Battery Ventures, with continued participation from Index Ventures and Join Ventures.
The funding shall be partly used to determine its first U.S. workplace in San Francisco.
Plain was based by Rohrbach and Matt Vagni. The 2 beforehand labored at Deliveroo from the early days, with Rohrbach main Deliveroo’s 40-person content material, analysis, and design crew, whereas Vagni labored on design programs and inside tooling.
Prospects for Plain embody firms like Sanity, Laravel, Stytch, and Raycast.
In a press release, Neeraj Agrawal, a Battery Ventures common companion, mentioned: “B2B assist is shifting into this new period of collaboration and AI.”
Nevertheless, Plain isn’t the one participant within the enterprise of aggregating these buyer assist channels. Within the US there may be additionally Thena and Pylon.
Final 12 months, Pylon landed $17 million in funding to construct a full-service B2B customer support platform, in a spherical led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from present buyers Basic Catalyst, Y Combinator and different unnamed angels. It now has over 250 prospects.
In the meantime, Thena has raised over $7 million and included Lightspeed and First Spherical Capital as buyers.
