New York-based Unthread, which uses AI to automate processing of customer support and other messages, has raised $3 million from West coast venture firms Moxxie Ventures and Y Combinator. It previously raised $500,000 from Bling Capital, also of California.
Founded by Jake McCloskey and CEO Tom Bachant in 2022, Unthread automates what is still a labor-intensive and clunky process. Its platform integrates Slack, Microsoft Teams and similar messaging services, as well as customer relationship management, or CRM, software to provide holistic solutions. The company claims its platform speeds up resolution of issues by 80%.
Upending Jira
Bachant, who has a bachelor’s degree in Biomedical/Medical Engineering, has previously co-founded and run two startups — employee-engagement platform Everyspace and Dashride, which developed dispatch software to support ride-hailing cabs. He is also an active investor.
In an interview with AlleyWatch, Bachant said his firm secured the funding by demonstrating evidence of Unthread’s superiority over incumbent systems.
“We talk about how traditional ticketing is being completely upended with chat apps and LLMs [large language models]. The key was being able to show how one of our customers, a major public company, moved their entire operations from a legacy Jira system to Unthread, proving that we can take on one of the biggest ticketing incumbents out there,” he told the New York website.
Commercial Real Estate
MacKenzie Companies
Advertising / Media / Communications / Public Relations
Nevins & Associates
Financial Services / Investment Firms
Chesapeake Corporate Advisors
Commercial Real Estate
Monday Properties
Venture Capital
Blue Delta Capital Partners
Internet / Technology
Foxtrot Media
Large Market
Bachant also talked up so-called “conversational ticketing” — converting Slack messages into suitable tickets, and processing them automatically — and expressed the belief that Unthread can initially address an IT service management market worth $8 billion.
“We started Unthread because we were doing B2B customer support over shared Slack channels, and it was impossible to keep track of different threads and DMs [direct messages] that our customers were sending us,” he told AlleyWatch.
“We built a Slack-native inbox to manage tickets across Slack, email, and in-app chat. We quickly saw that internal teams like IT and HR started using our tool to manage internal Slack channels, and we launched an internal helpdesk for these teams to resolve internal tickets faster right from Slack.”
