Every good startup begins with a problem, and this one may have started with a bad Slack conversation. According to CEO and co-founder Tom Bachant, he remembers seeing the chaos of Slack-based support. This included haphazard ticketing, a jumble of direct messages, and little chance for insight into the underlying problems.
The first point was simply seeing that Slack was a chaotic beast that needed to be tracked better. Then he saw that the actual work 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. More than just a custom Slackbot builder, Bachant and his team believe they have discovered a new way to track the problems that slow companies down and fix them before they become a larger issue.
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. Once Unthread is in place monitoring what problems are being reported and from where, the team can start automating 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 tech stack. This provides the flexibility to handle a wide variety of problems at scale. However, an important part of Unthread’s value is the basic organization of a ticketing system applied to a modern enterprise communications platform. Bachant said that large language models have changed the way people use their product, but ultimately they have not changed the problem that they are solving.
It has 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 capabilities while servicing clients.
As he tells it, the trick to that longevity is to stay focused on the people using your product. Bachant says they could only do this because they were having so many conversations with customers. Having that very clear picture of who the customer is, why they care about your product, and why they might leave and use something else has helped them to make a lot of decisions.