Unthread has a plan for cleaning up Slack and will show off its tech at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

If every good startup starts with a problem, this one can start with a bad Slack conversation. As CEO and co-founder Tom Bachant says, he remembers the chaos of Slack-based support — haphazard ticketing, the noise of DMs, and little opportunity for insight into underlying issues.

“The first point was just seeing that Slack was this kind of chaotic animal that needed to be tracked better,” Bachant remembers, “and then seeing that the actual work 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 clients such as Intuit, Lemonade, and Automattic. The goal is to automatically fix a significant portion of issues and forward others to specific support tickets. But more than just a custom Slackbot builder, Bachant and his team think they’ve discovered a new way to track problems that slow companies down — and fix them before they happen.

Unthread is a Startup battlefield At the top 20 finalists TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.

Sometimes this means interoperating with ticketing systems like Jira and Zendesk – but more often, it means replacing them. AI-based models mean flexibility unthreaded Can develop systems for HR, legal or finance departments. And once Unthread observes where issues are being reported from, 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 driven 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 the basic organization of a ticketing system, implemented in a modern enterprise communications platform. “LLMS changed the way people use our products,” says Bachant, “but ultimately it didn’t change the problem we were solving.

It has been a long road for Bachant to this point. His first startup, founded right out of college, was Dashride, a ride-sharing system meant to find drunk college kids a safe way home. After that company was acquired by Cruz in 2018, he founded an ill-fated HR startup before solving problems with Slack-based support. Now, he leads a lean team of 10 in New York, expanding Unthread’s capabilities while serving clients.

As he puts it, that longevity strategy is to focus on the people using your product. “We could only do this because we were having so many conversations with customers,” Bachant said. “Having a 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 make a lot of decisions.”

If you’d like to learn more about Unthread from the company — as well as check out dozens of others, hear their pitches and listen to guest speakers on four different stages — join us at Disrupt October 27 to 29 in San Francisco. Learn more here.