Internal customer support platforms are moving from platforms like email ticketing systems and chat to channels like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and even Discord. But with Slack, for instance, able to host hundreds of channels, the whole thing can become quite unwieldy.
Plain, out of the UK, thinks it has the answer. Its API-first platform consolidates all these communication channels, allowing businesses to streamline their support.
“It means you can literally talk to your customers wherever they are,” CEO Simon Rohrbach told TechCrunch over a call.
It can also do chat and email in the same way that a traditional Help Desk will, such as ZenDesk or Intercom, but also power Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Discord via one UI.
“It’s just really fast to use. People really love using it, and it has all the traditional support functionality, metrics around SLAs, response times, and so on,” said Rohrbach.
“We see this big shift happening from support being really siloed, to support working together with customer success and engineering and all the other teams really closely. And we power that internal collaboration as well,” he added.
The startup has now raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Battery Ventures, with continued participation from Index Ventures and Connect Ventures.
The funding will be partly used to establish its first U.S. office in San Francisco.
Plain was founded by Rohrbach and Matt Vagni. The two previously worked at Deliveroo from the early days, with Rohrbach leading Deliveroo’s 40-person content, research, and design team, while Vagni worked on design systems and internal tooling.
Customers for Plain include companies like Sanity, Laravel, Stytch, and Raycast.
In a statement, Neeraj Agrawal, a Battery Ventures general partner, said: “B2B support is moving into this new era of collaboration and AI.”
However, Plain isn’t the only player in the business of aggregating these customer support channels. In the US there is also Thena and Pylon.
Last year, Pylon landed $17 million in investment to build a full-service B2B customer service platform, in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from existing investors General Catalyst, Y Combinator and other unnamed angels. It now has over 250 customers.
Meanwhile, Thena has raised over $7 million and included Lightspeed and First Round Capital as investors.