If every good startup started with a problem, it might have started with a bad Slack conversation. As CEO and co-founder Tom Bachant explains, he remembers seeing the chaos of Slack-based support — haphazard ticketing, DM chaos, and little opportunity for information about underlying problems.
“The first point was just to see that Slack was this kind of chaotic beast that needed to be tracked better,” recalls Bachant, “and then to see that the actual work that was being requested by these teams could be easily automated.”
Their new company, Unthread, is the result of that realization. The company builds Slack-native, AI-powered support bots for high-profile clients like Intuit, Lemonade, and Automattic. The goal is to automatically fix a significant portion of the issues and forward others to specific support tickets. But even more than a custom Slackbot builder, Bachant and his team think they’ve discovered a new way to track the problems that slow down companies — and fix them before they become problems.
Unthreaded is a Startup Battlefield Top 20 Finalist in TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.
Sometimes this means interoperating with ticketing systems like Jira and Zendesk – but just as often, it means replacing them. The flexibility of AI-based models means Unthread can also build systems for human resources, legal or finance departments. And once Unthread is monitoring which issues are being reported from where, the team can begin to automate more tasks, ultimately creating a self-updating knowledge base for the entire company.
A large part of that process is guided by contemporary AI tools, which sit at the core of Unthread’s technology stack, providing the flexibility to handle a wide variety of problems at scale. But a significant part of Unthread’s value is the basic organization of the ticketing system, applied to a modern enterprise communications platform. “LLMS has changed the way people use our product, but ultimately it hasn’t changed the problem we’re solving,” Bachant said.
It’s been a long road for Bachchant to get to this point. His first startup, founded immediately after college, was a ride-sharing system called DashRide, aimed at helping drunk college kids find a safe way home. After Cruz acquired that company in 2018, he founded an ill-fated HR startup before tackling the problem of Slack-based support. Now, he leads a small team of 10 people in New York and is expanding Unthread’s strengths while serving clients.
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As he explains, the trick to longevity is to stay focused on the people who use your product. “We were only able to do that because we were having so many conversations with customers,” Bachant says. “Having a clear picture of who the customer is, why they care about your product, why they might abandon it and use something else has helped us make many decisions.”
If you want to learn more about Unthread from the company itself — as well as check out dozens of others, hear their pitches, and hear from guest speakers on four different stages — join us at Disrupt October 27 to 29 in San Francisco. Learn more here.
