Modern Wants to Delete the IT Ticket

Ask anyone who has waited three days for a laptop, or clicked through a service portal to request access they will need again next month, and they will tell you the same thing: the IT ticket is a small, familiar tax on getting work done. Modern, a San Francisco startup in Y Combinator's P26 batch, has decided that tax should not exist. Its bet is that software agents can now do the work an IT team routes, not just log it.

The company is two people and a sharp opinion. On its Y Combinator page, Modern describes itself plainly as "the ServiceNow killer," and follows with a line that reads like a thesis: "Modern resolves what ServiceNow assigns, and eliminates the tickets entirely." That is the whole pitch compressed into a sentence. Legacy IT service management sorts requests and hands them to humans. Modern wants the request answered before a human sees a queue.

01What Modern actually does

Modern consolidates the parts of an IT function that usually live in separate tools and separate approval chains: help desk, access management, hardware, on and off-boarding, security, and procurement. Instead of asking employees to learn a new portal, it operates inside the channels they already use - Slack, Teams, email, voice, plus WhatsApp and Telegram. You ask for something the way you would ask a colleague. An agent handles it.

The design choice underneath is worth pausing on, because it is the part that separates a chatbot from a system you would trust with production access. Modern splits reasoning from action. The agent reasons about a request in plain language, then executes code-based workflows derived from a company's standard operating procedures or from natural-language instructions. The thinking happens in chat. The doing happens in real, repeatable code.

That split is not a cosmetic detail. A language model that improvises an answer is useful for a question. It is dangerous for an action that touches accounts, devices, or spend. By making the agent interpret loosely but execute strictly, Modern is trying to buy the friendliness of a chat interface without inheriting the unpredictability. The consequence, if it works, is that the same request phrased three different ways by three different employees resolves to the same underlying workflow every time.

There is also a compounding claim baked into the product. Modern says coverage widens as it goes: each interaction teaches the system a little more about how this particular company works, so the share of requests it can close without a human keeps climbing. If that holds, the product a customer buys in month one is not the product they run in month twelve. It is the kind of flywheel that is easy to describe and hard to build, and it is the part most worth verifying against real usage rather than a slide.

02The problem it is aimed at

The complaint Modern is built around is not that ITSM platforms are bad at their job. It is that their job is the wrong shape for how fast companies now move. Traditional systems - ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, Ivanti, Zendesk - can take months to implement and weeks to design a single automation. In the meantime, ticket backlogs grow, approvals crawl through chains of people, onboarding and offboarding get done by hand (which is where mistakes and security gaps hide), and compliance ends up scattered across tools.

Offboarding is the quiet villain in most of these stories. When someone leaves, their access is supposed to disappear the same day. In practice it lingers, because removing it is manual and nobody owns the checklist. Modern's argument is that an always-on agent does own the checklist, every time, without being reminded.

Onboarding is the mirror image, and it is where the cost of a slow IT function is most visible. A new hire's first week is a series of small waits: an account that is half-created, a piece of access requested twice because the first request stalled, a laptop that arrives late because procurement and provisioning did not talk to each other. None of these is a disaster on its own. Stacked together and repeated at every company, they are a persistent drag that most organizations have simply learned to tolerate. Modern's pitch is that toleration was always a workaround for not having enough capable hands, and that agents change the math.

The other cost the company keeps pointing at is time-to-value. Buying legacy ITSM is not just a license; it is a project. Someone has to map the workflows, configure the automations, and shepherd the rollout, often over a quarter or more. Modern claims same-day implementation. It is fair to treat that number with some skepticism until it is proven across messy environments, but the direction is the real argument. In a market where implementation time has been a moat protecting incumbents, compressing it is a form of attack.

03Where it fits - and how it lands

Modern can run two ways, and the second is the clever one. It can stand alone as a complete ITSM platform for a company that is replacing a legacy system or never had one. Or it can sit on top of an existing ServiceNow or Jira Service Management install and quietly automate 80% or more of the requests flowing through it. Land as a layer, expand as a replacement. That overlay path lowers the risk of adopting a two-person startup: you do not have to rip anything out to see what it resolves.

There is a third mode aimed at the opposite end of the market: companies with no dedicated IT team at all. For them, Modern offers to be the IT function outright - a fully outsourced, always-on version of the thing bigger companies staff with people and license from ServiceNow. It is a notable spread of buyers for a young product: the enterprise that wants to automate around an existing system, and the startup that never wanted to hire an IT admin in the first place. Both share the same underlying wish, which is to spend as little attention as possible on IT and still have it work.

Meeting employees where they already are - Slack, Teams, a phone call - is a strategic choice as much as a convenience. Portals fail not because they lack features but because people avoid them; every extra tab is a reason to file a request later, or route around IT entirely. By collapsing the interface into the chat window someone already has open, Modern removes the friction that quietly kills adoption of internal tools. The service desk stops being a place you go and becomes something you talk to.

04The people behind it

Modern's credibility rests less on its size than on what its founders have shipped before. Seb Poole, the CEO, previously built Frankie, now Unmind - a digital mental-health platform used by Disney, Uber, Lendlease, Standard Chartered and Major League Baseball. The throughline from that company to this one is a taste for taking something bureaucratic and making it feel like a conversation.

His co-founder, Aleks Tomovski, spent 15-plus years in developer platforms. He was on the core team behind Wix Code - now Wix Studio - which put building tools in the hands of millions of citizen developers, and later worked on internal developer platforms and scaled engineering teams at Canva. That background matters for a product whose entire promise depends on turning a company's messy procedures into workflows that execute reliably.

It is a specific pairing. One founder has spent a career making bureaucratic, high-stakes processes feel approachable to ordinary people; the other has spent his making tools that let non-engineers build things that used to require engineers. Modern sits exactly at that intersection - a product that has to feel like a conversation on the surface and behave like disciplined software underneath. Two people is a small team to aim at a category defined by giants, but the resumes suggest they have each already solved one half of the problem before.

05Business, market, and the honest unknowns

Modern sells business software the way most enterprise startups do: a platform companies pay for, framed around the costs it removes - ticket volume, managed-service-provider bills, and the months usually lost to implementation. It launched publicly through Y Combinator in 2026 and is associated with a small seed round tied to the program. Team size is two. Revenue, customer counts, and valuation are not public, and this profile does not pretend to know them.

The market it is walking into is enormous and defended. ServiceNow alone is one of the largest software companies in the world, and it did not get there by being easy to displace. Modern's counter is the pattern that has toppled incumbents before: you rarely win by making the old workflow faster, you win by making it unnecessary. Whether "resolve, don't route" holds up outside a demo - across real security policies, edge-case approvals, and the specific chaos of one company's SOPs - is the thing to watch. The idea is clean. The proving ground is other people's IT.

The short version

Modern is an AI-native IT function that lives in the tools you already use, reasons about your requests, and runs real workflows to resolve them - standalone, as an overlay on ServiceNow, or as your entire outsourced IT team. It is early, it is small, and its ambition is not.