A community-management dashboard that turned itself into a support AI - how two ex-Zomato builders taught software to answer the questions people keep asking.
The Boston startup turned the most annoying part of Slack - answering the same question twice - into a business, then sold it to a company that wanted the whole workplace.
Social Intents is the leading AI customer support platform that helps businesses provide great customer service right from collaboration tools you already use. AI chatbots handle 75% of questions automatically while your team handles the important conversations.

A two-person, bootstrapped company in Atlanta built live chat that lives inside Microsoft Teams, Slack and Google Chat - and now lets ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini field most of the questions before a human ever looks.
The bootstrapped live chat company skips the separate support dashboard entirely - routing website chats, WhatsApp and SMS into Microsoft Teams, Slack and Google Chat, for a flat $39 a month with unlimited agents.
Userlike, LiveHelpNow, Social Intents and Rocket.Chat all put a chat box on your website. The interesting part is what happens to the conversation after a visitor hits send.

For nearly 40 years the Markham software company has built its ice Contact Center entirely in-house, turned down every acquisition offer, and outlasted rivals like Cisco, Five9 and Genesys. Its founder, Mandle Cheung, runs it while personally funding a 100-piece orchestra so he can conduct Mahler.
Contact Center with AI for Modern Customer Experiences

A new class of B2B support tools - Plain, Front, TeamSupport - is betting customers never wanted a help desk. They wanted an answer in the channel they were already in, and the old guard from BMC to USU is scrambling to catch up.
Smarten Spaces is a Singapore-founded proptech company that builds AI, IoT and big-data software for managing hybrid workplaces and commercial real estate. Its flagship platform - marketed as Jumpree and, more recently, SpaceOnAI - lets enterprises book desks and meeting rooms on 3D floor maps, forecast space demand, roster teams, and analyze how offices are actually used. Founded in 2017 by former Cisco India president Dinesh Malkani, the company serves Fortune 500 clients across 30+ countries and integrates deeply with Microsoft Teams.
Huddly is an Oslo-based company that builds AI-powered conference cameras for hybrid meeting rooms. By running computer-vision neural networks directly on the camera (edge AI), Huddly devices automatically frame speakers, switch angles like a TV director, and improve over time through software updates. Its products work with Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meet, and range from the single wide-angle IQ to the L1 and S1 and the multi-camera Huddly Crew system marketed as the world's first AI director. Founded in 2013, Huddly listed on Euronext Growth Oslo in December 2023.
Recall.ai is a San Francisco developer-infrastructure company that sells a universal API for capturing meetings. Instead of building brittle bots for Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, Slack Huddles and in-person calls, developers make a single API call and get back recordings, transcripts, and rich participant metadata. Founded by University of Waterloo dropouts David Gu and Amanda, the company pivoted from a consumer meeting app into the plumbing beneath a wave of AI notetakers and sales tools, and now powers thousands of companies. Recall.ai is Y Combinator-backed and raised a $38M Series B at a reported ~$250M valuation in September 2025.
Langfinity (formerly Byrdhouse) is a San Francisco AI company building a real-time voice and text translation platform for global teams. Founded by ex-interpreters Snow Huo and Jacob Greenway, it delivers industry-specific live interpretation across 100+ languages, plugging into video calls and Microsoft Teams so multilingual meetings, sales calls, safety briefings, and training sessions can happen without swapping tools or hiring a human interpreter.
Pinnacle is a New York-based HR-tech startup building scalable AI coaching that lives inside the tools employees already use. Its AI coach, Pascal, embeds in Slack, Microsoft Teams, and video meetings to give managers and employees personalized, real-time guidance drawn from their actual work context - performance reviews, 360 feedback, company competency frameworks, and day-to-day communication patterns. Founded by former accelerator CEO and executive coach Alexei Dunaway, Pinnacle raised a $2.5M seed round in March 2025 to bring executive-grade coaching to every employee, not just the C-suite.

Alexei Dunaway is the founder and CEO of Pinnacle, a New York and Palo Alto based startup building Pascal, an AI performance and career coach that lives inside Slack, Teams, and Zoom. A Stanford GSB graduate and Fulbright Scholar, he spent five years building an entrepreneur accelerator in Kenya before running an executive coaching practice for venture-backed founders. He now wants to give every worker the kind of coaching that used to be reserved for the C-suite. Pinnacle raised a $2.5M seed round in March 2025 led by eLab Ventures.

Fireflies.ai is a San Francisco-based AI meeting assistant that joins video and phone calls across Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams to record, transcribe, summarize and analyze conversations. Its bot captures speaker-labeled notes and action items, its AskFred assistant answers questions about past meetings, and its Perplexity-powered Live Assist offers real-time web answers during calls. Founded in 2016 by Krish Ramineni and Sam Udotong, the company reached a $1 billion valuation in 2025 while staying profitable and is used by teams across more than a million organizations.
Mio is an Austin, Texas company that makes enterprise chat platforms talk to each other. Instead of forcing a whole organization onto a single tool, Mio sits in the middle and federates the public APIs of Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Chat, Zoom Team Chat and Cisco Webex so a message typed in one app lands natively in another. Founded in 2015 by Tom Hadfield and James Cundle and backed by Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Zoom and Cisco, Mio turns the messy reality of multi-platform companies (and the partners they work with) into a single, interoperable conversation.
Tom Hadfield is the British entrepreneur and CEO of Mio, an Austin-based company that makes enterprise chat tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack and Google Chat talk to each other. He is the kid who built Soccernet with his dad at 12 and sold it to ESPN for $40 million at 17, attended Harvard, ran a biotech, then went through Y Combinator to attack the problem of messaging interoperability with backing from Khosla Ventures, Cisco and Zoom.
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.
PanTerra Networks is a San Jose-based UCaaS provider that bundles voice, video, messaging, file sharing and an AI contact center into one cloud platform called Streams.AI. Founded in 2001 by Silicon Valley engineer Arthur Chang, the company sells to mid-market businesses that want one vendor instead of five, and points to a 99.999% uptime record and HIPAA-compliant SmartBox file sharing as its main differentiators.

Mike Promotico is the President and CEO of ProTelesis Corporation, a San Diego-based managed IT services provider he has helped build into a West Coast powerhouse over 37+ years in telecommunications. Starting as a principal at INet Corp in 1987 and helping grow it into one of North America's largest Mitel resellers, Promotico has spent three decades bridging the gap between traditional telecom and modern IT - co-founding Technology Assurance Group, leading Standard Tel Networks, and ultimately guiding ProTelesis through eight strategic acquisitions including the 2025 cyber-physical convergence play with Amer-X Security. Under his leadership, ProTelesis manages over 100,000 endpoints for more than 10,000 customers across the U.S.

Wei Liu is the founder and CEO of DTEN Inc., a San Jose-based company he started in 2015 that has become a recognized leader in video conferencing hardware and collaboration technology. Drawing on his earlier experience scaling multi-touch hardware at PQ Labs, Liu built DTEN from a single 65-inch touchscreen device into a full portfolio of AI-powered, plug-and-play collaboration systems deployed across enterprise, education, and healthcare environments globally. DTEN's close partnership with Zoom - which made a strategic investment in the company in 2021 - and its expanding support for Microsoft Teams Rooms and other platforms reflects Liu's belief that seamless, equitable collaboration should be available to every participant, in every room.