Pylon raises $31M Series B to own the B2B customer support system of record

keyword. Hey, think hard about this. Uh, overall it's what I asked for and it's what I and and they delivered what what I asked for and so I've been pretty satisfied. I don't feel like my experience has been degraded.

It's a good model, sir.

It's a good model, sir.

On that note,

we have our next guest.

Our next guest, Marty to the stream.

How you doing?

Doing well. John, nice to meet you guys.

Good to meet you, too.

Oh, do we have to get the pallet ready? What are we discussing today? Give us an introduction. Explain what the company does. Give us the news. So, so first off, um you're watching TVPN Temple.

Watch Pylon TV, baby. Let's go.

There. There we go. Yeah. Um no, super excited to be on the show. I've been cycling you guys in in the morning. So, yeah. Excited to to be here and chat with you both. And you're all over my LinkedIn feed. So,

there we go. Credit to

Michael is dominating LinkedIn. We're bringing teapot to LinkedIn. They are not ready. Uh, but it's great to meet you. It's great to have you on the show.

Great to be here. Yeah. No, I'm here to announce our series B fund raise for Pylon. So, we just raised $31 million co-led by Andrees and BCV. So,

congratulations.

Sorry to interrupt.

Nice. Nice. Thank you. Always a crisp gong hit. Always out of

Good to see. Good to see Bane Capital getting a W here. You know, we just we just interviewed Pete Joy from Astronomer, another BCV company. So, we're we're happy to have you on the show.

We're really excited to work with them. So, um on the Bane side, you know, they're they're entering into the company. We're working with Merritt Hummer, uh and Abby Meyers from their team. Super impressed by them. Um continuing to work now with Jennifer Lee from Andre. Um they're already on the board. Um and yeah, no, this is an awesome fund raise. Actually, every time we've raised money, we haven't needed to. people kind of came to us and then you know pitched us on our vision did their reverse pitch and then we uh yeah we we made it happen. So um yeah really excited to be here and continue building the product.

Talk about slicing the market. Um obviously uh just AI for support is almost like a mega trend. There are market maps out there. Uh you've kind of sliced it to be more focused on B2B. uh take me through some of the slices of what what uh what support looks like in various B2B contexts because uh the customer support tickets that I maybe send into my law firm are different than I send into my uh my 3PL. Uh so so where where have you been seeing uh you know green shoots

beach heads uh opportunities? Uh what is the what is kind of the the early adopter customer for Pylon look like? Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. So, first off, part of the market, um, if we want to zoom out for a bit, um, Zenes, Salesforce, ServiceCloud make around 35% of their revenue off of B2B. And so, that's actually the slice of revenue that we're going after. On the Salesforce side, you know, total revenue from service cloud is $9 billion. So, we're going after uh quite a big chunk there. Um, so they have enough, you're saying they have enough to share. They they

Exactly. Yeah. uh and the difference between B2B and B TOC in consumer you have very simple transactional support questions and only one customerf facing team customer support in B2B you don't just have customer support you also have customer success solutions professional services account management and all the conversations that are coming in are related to not just like a transactional support question but could be routed to any one of those teams and you need account context that's being pulled in from not just that conversation but many other sources. So, for example, call recordings or uh notes that were left on customers implementation plans. And so, we kind of fit to all those different use cases, all those different personas and sync all that data in. Um, one way to think about us strategically is we're building something similar to Rippling, but for this post sales use case where I'm kind of all in one product consolidating a lot of tools that people would otherwise buy and making it really uh applied to this B2B uh customer persona. So there there's a debate on whether AI native tools like Pylon are compete are are are going after these end software markets or potentially um winning uh labor spend where do you kind of sit in that debate and and how do you here

there's a difference we have like the native AI agent companies your fins your decagons etc um they're going after enterprise immediately plugging into the system of record we're taking a different approach We're actually building the system of record from scratch. So replacing Zenesk and then layering in AI agents as well. Um and so we think basically whoever controls um the data the workflows actually has a lot of power and uh is way more defensible than the AI agent companies. And then also for the B2B use case because it's way more complex and you need need way more context across these many different channels and sources. Um we're plugging into those in a way that no one else is. So really I think we're going to win the B2B market completely and then um there's going to be a knife fight for consumer.

Uh last question for

it's already happening really.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh any sorry somebody posted today that stood out basically being like everyone thinks that every software software engineer is going to be replaced. Meanwhile Amazon still employs a 100,000 customer support reps.

Wow. I really that's

probably not 100. There's no way can't be that much.

You don't but but a lot a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean maybe through all the different uh like consulting arms and like third party groups if you really trace the

employees is

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. contracts with potentially. Um

and there's there's a difference as well like when you look at B2B it's actually usually much higher skilled labor and it's not just hey we're outsourcing it to a BO in another country. it's actually hey these are like um higher tier more complex support engineers who also work with solutions teams account managers um and it's just way more complicated of a deal so you're not handling transactional questions they're much more complicated and frankly actually AI mostly isn't good enough to answer a lot of these B2B questions um so instead of trying to solve them and do a bad job of it right now and tarnish customer relationships trying to essentially plug into all the workflows and own all those workflows so that we do have a chance to uh eventually become fully agentic once the AI gets good enough and we have the data consolidated into pylon

going fully agentic. I like that. Uh well, congrats on the race. Thank you so much for hopping on the show.

Love the clarity of vision and uh it's great to have you on.

We'll see you on LinkedIn.