TLDR:

• We’ve raised a $15M Series A led by Battery Ventures, with continued participation from our previous backers Index Ventures and Connect Ventures.

• Plain is the fastest, most powerful support platform for B2B companies. It powers high-touch, company-to-company support on channels like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, chat and more; for many of the world’s most exciting software companies.

• AI is transforming B2B customer support. Customer-facing teams are moving from reactive support to building proactive, collaborative partnerships with their customers. Customer interactions are shifting to real-time channels like Slack and Teams. This shift is creating a new category: customer collaboration. We are building Plain to define that category.

• We’re doubling down on our product, opening a San Francisco office to support our growing customer base and hiring across all disciplines. We’d love for you to join us.

Long version:

We’ve raised a $15m Series A led by Battery Ventures, with continued participation from Index Ventures and Connect Ventures, to build the best support platform for B2B.

Why we exist

B2B customer support is undergoing a rapid sea change.

1. AI is freeing customer-facing teams from manual and repetitive work. Companies are moving from reactive and siloed support to building proactive and collaborative partnerships with their customers.

2. Customer interaction is moving from transactional and siloed email and chat communications to collaborative, real-time channels like Slack, Discord and Microsoft Teams.

3. Support, success and engineering are moving ever closer together. According to Gartner, 30% of the Fortune 500 already say they will consolidate post-sales functions into one role by 2027.

These shifts are creating a new software category. Software that brings the structure and speed of an AI-powered support platform, but works like customer success platform. We call this category customer collaboration; and we’re building Plain to be the definitive customer collaboration platform.

What Plain does and why you should use it

Plain enables you to:

• Work with customers where they are: High-touch channels like Slack, Microsoft Teams and Discord are now critical to B2B support. Plain makes it easy to manage conversations from 10 places, in one place.

• Deliver collaborative support: Support is a team sport. Plain tracks escalated issues for you, works with the tools you and your team already use, and helps your entire company – support, engineering, and customer success – work together seamlessly.

• Move faster with AI: Plain automates repetitive tasks, drafts responses, and helps your team learn faster from your support.

It’s also a really well-crafted piece of software, if we do say so ourselves. Our customers love working in it. In the words of one of our customers: “Plain feels like the future.”

Companies like Sanity, Laravel, Stytch, Raycast and hundreds of others use Plain to power their support. Our goal is to help every company deliver better outcomes for their customers, align their teams around customer needs, and spend less time managing tools and workflows.

You can book a free 14 day trial here, fully supported by our team. We’d be happy to help with your migration, and if there’s a good fit, we’re happy to buy out existing contracts.

Who we’re partnering with

We’re thrilled to be partnering with Battery Ventures. They’re an iconic fund we’ve looked up to for a long time. They’ve backed and helped build some of the most iconic B2B SaaS companies in the world, such as Amplitude, Braze, Databricks, Postman and Gainsight.

We’re especially excited to welcome Neeraj Agrawal to our board. His deep expertise in scaling SaaS businesses and deep knowledge of the support space make him an incredible partner for our journey.

What we’re doing with the funding

First, we’re doubling down on our product to make Plain even more powerful and expand its AI capabilities. We're already seeing teams beyond customer support get a lot of value from Plain – like customer success, engineering and product. Our goal is to make Plain a platform that not only support can use, but one that every customer-facing team in the company can rely on to get closer to their customers. We see AI as pivotal in helping us achieve that.

Second, we’re expanding our team across every function – including sales, marketing, design and engineering. If you obsess over building something great, we’d love to hear from you. You can read more about our open roles here.

Finally, we’re excited to be opening an office in San Francisco. Since day one, many of our customers have been in the US – and we’re excited about being able to work alongside them much more closely in the months and years to come.

Thank you to all of our customers, backers, supporters and mentors for your invaluable help in building Plain. While this fundraise represents a milestone, it’s every day in between milestones that matters the most – and we’re very grateful to get to spend our days building Plain with all of you.

Link to press kit.