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