Intercom is an AI-first customer service company best known for Fin, its AI agent that resolves customer support conversations automatically. Founded in 2011 by four Irish engineers in San Francisco, the company rebuilt itself around large language models after ChatGPT launched, shipping Fin in 2023. By 2026 Fin was resolving more than a million tickets a week for customers like Anthropic, DoorDash and Mercury, and in May 2026 the parent company rebranded itself Fin to reflect that the AI agent had become the core business.
Twilio is a cloud communications platform that turns telephone networks, SMS, email, and messaging apps into a few lines of code. Through programmable APIs for voice, messaging, email, and identity verification, plus a customer data platform built on its Segment acquisition, Twilio lets developers and enterprises embed communication and customer engagement directly into their software. More than 400,000 active customer accounts, including roughly 90% of the Fortune 500, build on it.
Webex is the collaboration platform born from one of the web's first conferencing companies and now run by Cisco. It bundles meetings, calling, messaging, webinars, contact center, and a line of conference-room hardware into a single suite, layered with AI for transcription, real-time translation across dozens of languages, and agent assistance. It serves enterprises, governments, schools, and hospitals that need secure, large-scale communication for distributed teams.
Clickatell is a chat commerce and messaging platform that helps brands talk to and transact with customers across SMS, WhatsApp and other channels. Founded in 2000 in Cape Town, it was the first company to wire businesses on the internet to consumers on mobile phones using SMS in four lines of code. Twenty-five years later it powers chat banking, tokenized WhatsApp payments and Chat-2-Pay with Visa for over 10,000 customers worldwide.
Chase Kim is a startup founder who spent years deep inside Sendbird, the messaging infrastructure company powering conversations for DoorDash, Reddit, and Hinge, where he led the forward deployment team during Sendbird's critical 2024 pivot into AI agents for customer experience. In 2026, he co-founded Light Anchor (YC P26) with Sangha Park to build fully autonomous e-commerce brands run entirely by AI agents, betting that the future of consumer business is capped by compute, not headcount.
Connectly is a San Francisco AI startup that turns WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS and RCS threads into a real sales channel. Its Sofia AI agent talks to shoppers in natural language, recommends products, recovers carts, and hands off to humans when needed. The company raised a $20M Series B led by Alibaba in September 2024 and works with retailers and consumer brands across Latin America, the US, and Asia.
Stefanos Loukakos is the Co-founder and CEO of Connectly.ai, a San Francisco-based AI conversational commerce platform that raised a $20M Series B led by Alibaba in September 2024, bringing total funding to $37.2M at ~$100M valuation. A native of Greece, he previously served as Head of Facebook Messenger Business and Director of Blockchain at Meta, and as Country Director of Google Greece. He built Connectly to let retailers sell through WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS, and web chat - turning customer messages into revenue.
Brian Acton is the co-founder of WhatsApp, which sold to Facebook for $19 billion in 2014, and the founder of Signal Foundation, where he champions privacy-focused communication. After walking away from $850 million in unvested Facebook stock over ethical disagreements about user privacy, he invested $50 million to build Signal, an encrypted messaging platform designed to put users first. A Stanford computer science graduate who was rejected by both Facebook and Twitter in 2009, Acton has given over $1 billion to charitable causes with his wife Tegan, focusing on low-income families, reproductive rights, and internet privacy.
Jan Koum is the Ukrainian-born co-founder of WhatsApp who built one of the world's most-used messaging platforms on a foundation of radical privacy and zero advertising — then sold it to Facebook for $19.3 billion in 2014. A self-taught programmer who arrived in the US at 16 on food stamps, Koum's journey from a Soviet surveillance state to the pinnacle of Silicon Valley is one of the most unlikely origin stories in tech. He left WhatsApp in 2018 rather than compromise its privacy principles, and now runs Newlands, a secretive investment firm, while giving billions through the Koum Family Foundation.
Stewart Butterfield is a Canadian technology entrepreneur and angel investor who co-founded Flickr (2004) and Slack (2013) — two landmark products that emerged as accidental pivots from failed multiplayer games. A self-taught coder with a Cambridge philosophy degree, Butterfield sold Flickr to Yahoo for ~$25 million in 2005 and Slack to Salesforce for $27.7 billion in 2021. His 'We Don't Sell Saddles Here' memo became a canonical document in Silicon Valley product thinking. Since departing Slack in January 2023, he has been active as an angel investor with 32+ portfolio companies.
Gregor Hohpe is a transformation architect, prolific author, and sought-after speaker who has spent decades helping organizations bridge the gap between boardroom strategy and engine-room engineering. Co-author of the canonical 'Enterprise Integration Patterns' (2003), he coined the concept of the 'Architect Elevator' - the idea that great architects must fluently move between executive suites and server racks. A former Google Cloud Technical Director, Singapore Smart Nation Fellow, and Chief Architect at Allianz SE, Hohpe now runs the Architect Elevator platform, writing, teaching, and consulting on IT strategy, cloud, and the art of making everyone else in the room smarter.