Fundraising Fox

Pylon

YC W23

San Francisco, US · Founded 2022 · 120 employees · Hiring · 8 known investors

Pylon provides post-sales workflow management tools designed for B2B teams operating across multiple communication platforms including email and chat. The platform enables teams to manage complex accounts and coordinate conversations among multiple stakeholders.

Also known as Pylon Labs, Inc.

Founders & leadership· Y Combinator alumni (W23)

Pylon was founded in 2022 by Advith Chelikani, Marty Kausas, and Robert Eng.

ACAdvith Chelikani
Advith ChelikaniinCo-FounderAdvith Chelikani is the founder of Pylon, which provides post-sales workflow management tools for B2B teams across multiple communication platforms.30 Under 30 2026
MKMarty Kausas
Marty Kausasin𝕏Customer Support, also Co-Founder & CEOHe began programming in middle school, developed software skills through high school robotics, and gained product-building experience via collegiate hackathons.30 Under 30 2026
RERobert Eng
Robert EnginCo-Founder30 Under 30 2026

Investors · 8

Funding

SEC filings, press & company announcements

Source: company announcements and press reports — follow each round's link for the claim.

Company profile

researched Aug 2026

Pylon (legal entity Pylon Labs, Inc.) develops a customer support platform purpose-built for B2B companies, marketed as an "agentic support platform." The product ingests customer conversations from Slack, Slack Connect, Microsoft Teams, email, chat widget, SMS, WhatsApp, Discord, Telegram, forms and phone, and converts them into issues enriched with account-level context. Around this intake layer, Pylon offers ticketing, SLAs and timers, support hours, assignment rules, macros, triggers, CSAT and NPS surveys, a knowledge base, customer portal, workforce management, analytics and dashboards, broadcasts, custom objects and fields, roles and user management, and an API with webhooks and custom apps.

The AI layer consists of several agent types: an Assist Agent that investigates issues and takes actions on request, Background Agents that run predefined "Skills" automatically when triggered and post results into an issue, a Slack Agent that answers questions and acts from Slack using the same context and permissions, and a Support Agent that resolves customer questions across channels and escalates to humans when judgment is required. Skills are reusable instructions that teach agents team-specific investigation and resolution procedures. Pylon also builds support, account and product intelligence over conversations, CRM records, product usage, logs and code, and exposes that context to agents and other tools via the Model Context Protocol. Documented connectors include Salesforce, HubSpot, Gong, Snowflake, BigQuery, Linear, Jira, Confluence, Notion, PostHog, Mixpanel, LaunchDarkly, Cursor, and LLMs such as Claude and ChatGPT.

Pylon positions its Account Intelligence and Product Intelligence modules as tools for surfacing upsell opportunities, at-risk accounts, churn drivers and feature requests from conversational data, extending the product beyond support into broader post-sales workflows.

Founding story

Founders Advith Chelikani and Robert Eng met at Caltech and later met Marty Kausas during the Kleiner Perkins Fellowship. All three had worked as software engineers at companies including Airbnb, Samsara and Affinity before founding the company in November 2022. Their initial insight was that chat platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams were partially replacing email in B2B communication, which broke existing post-sales workflows. Marty Kausas is Co-Founder and CEO.

Business model

Pylon sells software to businesses; the site directs prospects to book a demo and lists comparison pages against incumbent support suites. Sources do not disclose pricing structure.

Not specified in the sources beyond the company reporting two consecutive years of 5x+ year-over-year revenue growth as of August 2025.

Traction

Pylon reported over 750 customers and two years of 5x+ year-over-year revenue growth at the time of its August 2025 Series B, with more than 150 migrations from legacy platforms. Its website later cites more than 1,500 B2B customers globally. Y Combinator lists a team size of 120.

Latest developments

As of 2026 the company markets an Agentic Support Platform with Assist, Background, Slack and Support agents plus Skills, natural-language configuration of workflows and routing, MCP-based access to customer intelligence, and general availability of Pylon Workforce Management. Its about page states it has raised $50M+ and cites recent coverage from The Information, Bain Capital Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

Full profile — market position, technology, go-to-market, geography, history, risks & controversies

Market position

Pylon describes itself as the only agentic support platform purpose-built for B2B and competes directly with legacy support suites; the site publishes comparison pages for Zendesk, Intercom, Plain, Front, Salesforce and Jira, and blog content targeting Freshdesk, Zoho Desk and LiveAgent alternatives. The company reported that more than 150 companies had migrated to Pylon from Zendesk, Intercom and Salesforce Service Cloud as of August 2025. The Information characterized it as a self-described "Zendesk killer" backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Bain.

Pylon argues that incumbent support platforms were designed for transactional B2C ticketing and treat B2B needs as an afterthought, whereas its product is organized around accounts, multiple stakeholders, cross-functional post-sales teams and modern chat channels. Rather than deflecting customers with chatbots, it positions AI agents as augmenting human agents by pre-investigating issues and executing follow-up work across connected systems.

Technology

The platform is built around omnichannel conversation intake, account-level context aggregation, and orchestration of LLM-based agents. It integrates with CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot), issue trackers (Jira, Linear), knowledge bases (Notion, Confluence), data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery), product analytics (PostHog, Mixpanel), feature flags (LaunchDarkly), call recording (Gong), code context (Cursor), and LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT). Aggregated intelligence is exposed through a Model Context Protocol server (Pylon MCP). Developer surfaces include a REST API, webhooks, custom apps, embedded iframes, mobile SDKs and a chat widget JavaScript API, with identity verification and custom authentication options for the portal and knowledge base.

Go-to-market

Sales-led motion centered on demo requests, supported by content marketing (blog guides, case studies, webinars, videos), competitor comparison pages, and distribution through the Y Combinator network, where hundreds of YC companies are cited as users.

B2B software companies and their post-sales organizations, including support, customer success, solutions engineering, account management and implementation teams, particularly those conducting support over Slack, Microsoft Teams and Discord. Named users include Hightouch, Retool, Deel, Together AI, Cognition, Temporal and AssemblyAI.

Geography

Headquartered in San Francisco with an in-person office there; the company describes its customer base as global.

History

Pylon was founded in November 2022. Its first product was a Slack-to-Zendesk integration, which won Hightouch as a customer within weeks; the company then joined Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch. About a year in, it broadened from a Slack integration into a full support platform for B2B post-sales teams. TechCrunch covered the company in July 2023 (managing B2B conversations in Slack) and in August 2024 (a $17M investment). In August 2025 Pylon announced a $31M Series B co-led by a16z and Bain Capital Ventures, taking total funding to $51M. By 2026 the company was marketing an agentic support platform with multiple AI agent products and a Workforce Management module.

Risks & controversies

No controversies are reported in the available sources. Note that an unrelated company also named Pylon, an embedded mortgage infrastructure platform founded in 2021 in New York by Ankur Jain and Nikhil Sachdev, appears in web results and should not be conflated with this company.

Compiled by commissioned research from 8 cited public sources — announcements, filings, and press listed under research sources below.

Key figures

latest reported
CustomersJan 20261,500 companies
Customers migrated from legacy platformsAug 2025150 companies
HeadcountAug 2026177
Team sizeJan 2026120 employees

Company-reported or press-reported figures, each dated to when it was claimed — not independently audited.

Images

Pylon photoPylon photo

Competitors · 7

by search overlap
Zendesk1343 shared keywordsThis is Zendesk's internal belonging/diversity and inclusion program page, not a company profile page for an external company. It describes Zendesk's internal culture initiatives and leadership development programs.
Hiver788 shared keywordsHiver is an AI-native customer service platform that unifies email, chat, Slack, voice, social, and WhatsApp into one workspace, with AI Agents that triage tickets, draft replies, and run multi-step resolutions across connected tools like Salesforce, Shopify, Jira, and NetSuite. It serves support teams handling complex, high-volume requests and offers both an omnichannel product and a Gmail-based helpdesk.
Help Scout702 shared keywordsHelp Scout builds a customer communication platform for growing businesses that want to provide personalized support at scale. The software powers customer-facing teams across organizations of all sizes, enabling them to manage incoming customer conversations while maintaining a people-centric approach to customer service.
Atlassian508 shared keywordsAtlassian offers a teamwork platform combining project planning, knowledge management, and AI orchestration tools for teams and their AI agents. Its products help organizations plan, execute, and deliver work at scale.
Front452 shared keywordsFront is a support and sales platform that combines messaging, internal collaboration, and AI automation to handle customer requests and sales workflows. It serves sales and customer service teams across multiple communication channels.
Zapier363 shared keywordsZapier provides a platform for connecting AI models and agents to workflows and business applications, enabling teams to automate tasks across over 9,000 apps without coding. The platform serves enterprises, operations teams, and businesses of all sizes looking to deploy AI-driven automation for lead capture, customer support, employee onboarding, and other business processes.
Fin358 shared keywordsFin (formerly Intercom) is an AI-powered customer agent platform that handles customer service, sales, and ecommerce interactions for over 30,000 companies. The company resolves millions of conversations weekly and serves businesses across all industries seeking automated customer experience management.

Companies competing with Pylon for the same Google search keywords, organic and paid, via search-intersection analysis.

Timeline · 6

launches, deals, and filings
Jan 2026
Agentic Support platform and Workforce Management

Pylon markets an 'Agentic Support Platform' comprising Assist Agent, Background Agents, Slack Agent, Support Agent and Skills, and states that Pylon Workforce Management is available.

source ↗

Aug 2025
Pylon announces $31M Series B co-led by a16z and Bain Capital Ventures

Pylon announced a $31 million Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital Ventures, with continued participation from General Catalyst, Y Combinator and other existing investors, bringing total funding to $51 million.

$31M source ↗

Aug 2024
$17M investment reported by TechCrunch

TechCrunch reported that Pylon landed a $17M investment to build a full-service B2B customer service platform (headline listed in YC news section).

$17M source ↗

Jan 2023
Accepted into Y Combinator Winter 2023 batch

Pylon joined Y Combinator's W23 batch shortly after signing its first customer; primary YC partner is Harj Taggar.

source ↗

Nov 2022
Pylon founded

Founders started Pylon in November 2022 based on the observation that B2B companies were running support over Slack, Teams and Discord rather than email and ticket forms.

source ↗

Jan 2022
First product: Slack-to-Zendesk integration

Pylon's initial product was a Slack-to-Zendesk integration; its first customer was Hightouch, acquired within weeks of launch.

source ↗

Dated company events from announcements, filings, and press; legal rows summarize public dockets and regulator releases.

In the news

Research sources · 8

primary sources listed

8 public sources were cited for this profile; the first-party ones are listed here.

Frequently asked questions

What does Pylon do?
Pylon is a San Francisco B2B customer support platform combining omnichannel ticketing with AI agents for post-sales teams.
Who founded Pylon?
Pylon was founded by Advith Chelikani, Marty Kausas, Robert Eng in 2022.
Who are Pylon's investors?
Pylon's investors include Activant Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures, Horizon, Y Combinator, BoxGroup, General Catalyst, Uncorrelated Ventures.
Where is Pylon headquartered?
Pylon is headquartered in San Francisco, US.