Plain draws $15 million and chats B2B customer service chat to one platform

The internal customer support platform has moved from platforms such as the email ticketing system to channels such as Slack, Microsoft teams, and even Discord. But for example, Slack is able to host hundreds of channels, which can make the whole thing very unwieldy.

Plainoutside the UK, I think there is an answer. Its API-first platform integrates all these communication channels and enables businesses to streamline their support.

“That means you can literally talk to customers wherever you are,” CEO Simon Rohrbach told TechCrunch over the phone.

You can also chat and email not only with traditional help desks like Zendesk and Intercom, but also with Power Slack, Microsoft teams, or Discord via one UI.

“It’s really fast to use. People love to use it, and it has all the traditional support features, metrics around SLAs, response times and more,” says Rohrbach.

“We believe this big change is really changing, because support is really silent, to support our customers in success and engineering, and working with all the other teams. And we will strengthen that internal collaboration as well,” he added.

The startup has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Battery Venture, with continuous participation from Index and Connect Ventures.

The funds will be partially used to establish the first US office in San Francisco.

Plain was founded by Rohrbach and Matt Vagni. The two previously worked at early Deliveroo, while Rohrbach led Deliveroo’s 40-person content, research and design teams, while Vagni worked on design systems and internal tools.

Plain’s customers include companies such as Sanity, Laravel, Stytch and Raycast.

In a statement, Neeraj Agrawal, general partner of battery ventures, said, “B2B support is shifting into this new era of collaboration and AI.”

However, the only player in the business that aggregates these customer support channels is not plain. It is also in the US after that and Pylon.

Last year, pylon landing The $17 million investment to build a full-service B2B customer service platform led by Andreessen Horowitz is accompanied by participation from the popular catalysts of existing investors, Y-combinators and other unknown angels. We currently have over 250 customers.

Meanwhile, Thena raised over $7 million and included Lightspeed and First Round Capital as investors.