Assembled is a San Francisco-based software company building the workforce management and AI agent platform for modern customer support teams. Founded in 2018 by three Stripe veterans, it now helps companies like Stripe, Robinhood, GoFundMe, Etsy, and Intercom forecast demand, schedule agents, and resolve a growing share of tickets with AI across chat, voice, and email.
Gorgias is a conversational AI and helpdesk platform built for ecommerce brands. It unifies email, chat, SMS, voice and social into one inbox, then layers an AI Agent that resolves a majority of tickets automatically while turning support into a revenue channel.
Advith Chelikani is the co-founder and CTO of Pylon, an AI-powered B2B customer support platform based in San Francisco. A Caltech computer science graduate and former Samsara engineer, Advith co-founded Pylon in November 2022 alongside Marty Kausas and Robert Eng. In under three years, the company raised $51.2M in total funding - including a $17M Series A from a16z in 2024 and a $31M Series B in 2025 - scaled to 750+ customers, and grew revenue 5x year-over-year for two consecutive years. Pylon replaces legacy platforms like Zendesk by meeting enterprise support teams where their customers already are: Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord.
Marty Kausas is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pylon, the AI-native B2B customer support platform he built after leaving Airbnb and spending 18 months failing at other ideas. Founded in November 2022 alongside Advith Chelikani and Robert Eng, Pylon has raised $51 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator - reaching 1,500+ customers and positioning itself as the definitive alternative to Zendesk for complex, multi-stakeholder B2B environments. Kausas is known for his systematic founder-led sales approach, LinkedIn content dominance, and the bold ambition to build a $10 billion+ public company.
Robert Eng is Co-Founder and CPO of Pylon, the AI-native B2B customer support platform built for how enterprise teams actually communicate. A Caltech computer science and history double major who cut his teeth at Facebook, DoorDash, and Affinity, he co-founded Pylon in November 2022 with Advith Chelikani and Marty Kausas. The company - backed by $51M from a16z, Bain Capital Ventures, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator - has grown to 750+ customers including Together AI, Cognition, and AssemblyAI with 5x+ year-over-year revenue growth for two consecutive years.
Romain Lapeyre is the Co-founder and CEO of Gorgias, the AI-powered customer experience platform built for ecommerce brands. Founded in Paris in 2015 with co-founder Alex Plugaru and later relocated to San Francisco, Gorgias has grown to serve 16,400+ merchants including Glossier, Steve Madden, and Dollar Shave Club, reaching $80M ARR with roughly 520 employees and $103M+ in total funding. Lapeyre studied at HEC Paris and has built Gorgias using a data-driven, partner-led growth model - scaling to 10,000+ customers without traditional cold calling.
Ryan Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Assembled, the AI-powered customer support platform trusted by Stripe, Robinhood, and Etsy. A former machine learning engineer at Stripe (employee #80), he co-founded Assembled in 2018 with his brother John Wang and Brian Sze after observing how hard it was to run exceptional support at scale. Assembled has raised $70.7M, including a $51M Series B led by NEA, and now manages contact centers with up to 20,000 agents across chat, email, voice, and workforce management.
Pylon is the AI-native customer support platform built specifically for B2B companies. It unifies tickets across Slack Connect, Microsoft Teams, Discord, email, and in-app chat into a single inbox, automates routine work with AI agents, and surfaces account-level intelligence for post-sales teams. Backed by a16z, Bain Capital Ventures, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator.
Decagon is a San Francisco-based enterprise AI company building conversational agents that handle customer support across chat, email, voice and SMS. Its platform, anchored by Agent Operating Procedures (AOPs), lets companies define complex workflows in natural language and apply them consistently across channels. Customers include Hertz, Chime, Notion, Duolingo, Rippling, Bilt, Oura, Eventbrite and Affirm.
Alyssa Bernstein is the co-founder, President, and CEO of wrrk, an Austin-based company that provides fully managed, fractional customer support solutions for fast-growing brands and startups. With a background in product management at RetailMeNot and Main Street Hub, she launched wrrk in 2016 to give entrepreneurs access to experienced, embedded support teams without the overhead of building in-house. Under her leadership, wrrk has grown to serve 125+ brands including Bombas, Taylor Stitch, and Supergoop, offering omnichannel support via US-based and offshore teams in the Philippines.
Francis Cruz Barte is the Chief Executive Officer of Exypnox Inc., a Philippines-based business process outsourcing company that partners exclusively with US-based software companies to build high-impact, cost-efficient remote teams. Operating out of San Francisco and Bonifacio Global City in Taguig, Metro Manila, Francis built Exypnox around a singular premise: that Filipino talent, properly organized and empowered, can rival any global workforce. With a background spanning BPO operations, enterprise sales, and regional management at companies like Boostlingo, he now leads a 75-person team delivering customer support, technical support, HR management, accounting, payroll, and business development services to fast-scaling US tech firms.
Toby Gabriner is the CEO of Help Scout, a Boston-based customer support platform serving over 12,000 businesses. A four-time CEO and five-time president with more than two decades of scaling B2B software companies, Gabriner grew Adap.tv from $200K to $200M+ in revenue before its $465M acquisition by AOL in 2013, transformed Bitly from a link shortener into a multi-product analytics platform, and led AdRoll's evolution into NextRoll. A Mission District native who started community college after being kicked out of home at 18, he now brings a customer-first philosophy to Help Scout at the precise moment AI is reshaping customer support.
Jesse Zhang is the 28-year-old co-founder and CEO of Decagon, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI company valued at $4.5 billion that builds autonomous AI agents for customer service. A Harvard Computer Science graduate who sold his first startup Lowkey to Niantic, Zhang pivoted to enterprise AI in 2023 when GPT-4 arrived, spending months in customer discovery interviews before writing a single line of code. In under two years, he scaled Decagon from stealth to unicorn status, raised $481M total, landed clients like Duolingo, Notion, Hertz, and Deutsche Telekom, and made Forbes 30 Under 30. He is also a Grandmaster-ranked Teamfight Tactics player, a competition math problem author, and an angel investor in 20+ startups.
Yuma AI is a Boston-based AI customer support platform purpose-built for ecommerce brands. Founded in late 2022 by serial YC founder Guillaume Luccisano (Socialcam, Triplebyte), Yuma deploys autonomous AI agents that resolve 60–93% of customer support tickets end-to-end — handling returns, refunds, WISMO queries, and order changes — inside the helpdesks merchants already use (Gorgias, Zendesk, Kustomer and more). With 100+ paying Shopify merchants, over 5 million automated queries, and a $5M seed round backed by Google's Gradient Ventures, Yuma is building the AI customer experience layer for modern commerce.