
A four-founder startup out of Branch is betting that B2B support belongs where customers already talk - Slack, Teams, email - and that AI agents, not queues, should do the routing. The incumbents it is chasing are Microsoft, Atlassian, Oracle, EasyVista, and Text.

A Mountain View startup thinks the support ticket is the wrong shape for B2B, and it is squaring up against ServiceNow, HubSpot and SAP to prove customers would rather get help where they already talk.

SAP, ServiceNow, Gorgias, Kayako, Supportbench and Thena are all chasing the same promise - support that resolves itself. Here is who is actually building it, and who is just bolting AI onto an old inbox.

The bootstrapped, $20M-ARR help desk run by Shalin Jain has folded in Thena, the Slack-native B2B support startup backed by Lightspeed and First Round. Thena's standalone app is sunsetting - its bet on support-in-the-channel is not.
InvGate, Jitbit, USU, Thena, Kustomer, SolarWinds, ProProfs and SAP all want to run your support queue. Here is how the help desk software field actually splits - and who each one is really built for.
Six help desk platforms - Dixa, Front, Thena, Oracle, InvGate and Jitbit - are betting that software can close your support tickets faster than the people you hired to answer them. Here is how they actually differ.

For twenty years every company bought the same ticket queue. Now B2B support has walked out of the inbox and into Slack, and a new class of tools is racing to catch it.