London, 3 November – Plain, the London-based startup founded by two senior ex-Deliveroo employees, has today announced a $6 million seed investment round to make customer support easier, faster and more scalable for businesses.

The funding round was co-led by Connect Ventures and Index Ventures, with participation from several prominent angels*, including Soleio, who led early design at Facebook, Messenger and Dropbox and advisor to Figma; former Gainsight COO Allison Pickens, former Algolia CEO Nicolas Dessaigne, Matt Robinson, co-founder at GoCardless and Nested; Mike Hudack, formerly Deliveroo CPTO and Monzo CPO; and Zack Kanter, founder and CEO of Stedi.

Over the last decade, technology businesses have become more sophisticated in how they operate, more engineering-centric in how they think, and more demanding in the level of quality and speed they expect from software. Yet, customer service tools available to them have not kept up with that shift. More often than not, they’re complex, bloated, and completely disconnected from companies’ internal tools and data  – leaving customer support teams isolated, and customers dissatisfied.

Solving this disconnect, and making it easier for engineering teams to support their colleagues in customer service, is what Plain believes holds the key to greater efficiency. To address this, Plain is building a modern, design-centric and API-first tool, so companies can provide fast, streamlined support to their customer service teams with fewer workarounds, fewer hacks, and fewer lines of code.

The customer support platform, which also launches its open beta at Web Summit Lisbon today, is built to show live customer data and customer communications in one place  – all while offering a superior developer experience for ease of integration and full extensibility.

Plain was founded in 2020 by CEO Simon Rohrbach, an early employee and former director of design at Deliveroo, and CTO Matt Vagni, a developer and designer with experience at Lyst and Deliveroo, and online pharmacy company LloydsDirect – one of the largest chemists in the UK.

Rohrbach says:

“The fundamental problem we’re solving is context: Plain offers a single source of truth for customer interactions, powered by companies’ own systems and data – so when someone gets in touch with a problem, the company immediately knows who they are, what their order is, what’s happened so far – and can resolve it in a single click. Customer service teams are often left unsupported by their colleagues in engineering because traditional systems can be hard to integrate and build with. As a result, customer support teams are left to contend with poorly integrated tools, fragmented data, and disconnected systems. We’re designing Plain from day 1 with both engineering and customer service teams in mind, so it can be quickly and easily customised, rather painfully ‘hacked’ after the fact.”

Compared with legacy platforms, Plain has three key advantages. One is the ease with which it can be integrated into companies own systems: it can be deployed right away with a beautiful, lightning fast app, but also infinitely extended using the company’s powerful APIs. Secondly, Plain is built with developer experience in mind, making it a breeze to integrate and build with.  And finally, Plain is built to leverage companies’ own live systems and data, rather than requiring companies to sync data or write complex apps  – something that makes startups hesitate to use legacy providers, since it can be cumbersome to maintain.

Plain is specifically designed for technology businesses who want to invest in core technical infrastructure that will maximise company growth, not just ‘back office’ necessities to be addressed once the company reaches a certain size. With Plain, start-ups can offer a seamless customer experience from the outset, with a tool that’s capable of growing and adapting to a business’ needs as it scales.

“A better experience for developers means a better one for agents, which means a better one for customers,’ says Georgia Stevenson, the partner who led the investment for Index. ‘Consumer expectations have shifted radically in recent years in terms of design and functionality. Plain is what will empower businesses to approach customer service with the same thoughtfulness they give to their core product – and in fact, to see customer service as part of that product, not an afterthought.”

The size of the opportunity for Plain is huge: the global addressable market for software to help manage customer relationships grew to $24.6 billion in 2020. This market growth was spurred by the need for businesses to engage with their customers more effectively during the height of COVID-19, and will only continue to grow, according to Gartner – with exceptional customer support fast becoming a revenue-generator and strategic differentiator for brands, not just a cost-line or ‘necessary evil’.

“Customer service software is the next SaaS category that is ripe for innovation,” added Pietro Bezza, co-founder and Managing Partner who led the investment for Connect Ventures. Like payments, CS is mission-critical for the business but developers don’t want to build it from scratch. Plain is building the core CS infrastructure of tomorrow. APIs-first, loved by developers. Opinionated and beautiful UI, loved by CS agents.  Simon and Matt form the perfect duo to execute this vision and we are super thrilled to partner with them.”

Also joining the round were CEO Zack Kanter, and Growth & Customer Operations Lead David Kanter from developer platform Stedi, one of Plain’s customers*.* David said:

“At Stedi, our primary users are developers and builders, not just support tickets waiting in a queue for the next available agent. We want a platform that allows us to build a support experience that enables a different type of interaction; one that helps developers get access to the experts and resources they need so they can get back to building. That’s what we found in Plain. We’re excited to back their vision – both as a customer and as angel investors”

The team at Plain currently consists of 9 people, and the new capital from investors will accelerate Plain’s growth and expansion across their Marketing, Sales, Design and Engineering teams over the next year.

ENDS

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Notes to Editors

Simon will be attending the 2022 Web Summit in Lisbon 1-3 November, if you’d like to chat face to face.

List of additional investors backing Plain

Including those mentioned above

• Index Ventures (Georgia Stevenson)
• Connect Ventures (Pietro Bezza)
• Emily Kramer & Kathleen Estreich of Asana, Intercom, Box & Carta through their fund MKT1
• Soleio, who led early design at Facebook, Messenger and Dropbox and advisor to Figma
• Allison Pickens, former Gainsight COO
• Zack Kanter, Founder & CEO, Stedi
• David Kanter, Growth & Customer Operations Lead, Stedi
• Rona Ruthen, ex-VP of Customer Operations at Monzo and angel investor
• Thomas Paul Mann, Co-Founder & CEO of Raycast
• Mike Hudack, former Deliveroo CPTO and Monzo CPO
• Nicolas Dessaigne, former Algolia CEO
• Luca Martinetti, Co-Founder & CTO of Truelayer
• Chris Schagen, former CMO, Contentful
• Matt Robinson, Co-Founder of Nested and GoCardless
• …and several more

About Plain

Plain was founded in 2020 by CEO Simon Rohrbach, an early employee and former director of design at Deliveroo, and CTO Matt Vagni, a developer and designer with experience at Lyst and Deliveroo who went on to help grow online pharmacy company Echo into one of the largest chemists in the UK.

While working at both Deliveroo and Echo, Rohrbach and Vagni experienced the very real problem of trying to improve tooling for their colleagues in customer service. Working in those environments, they recognised that over the last decade businesses had become more complex in how they work, more engineering-centric in how they think, and more demanding in the level of quality and speed they expect from software.

However, customer service tools available have not kept up with that shift. More often than not, they’re complex, bloated, and hard to build with – leaving the teams somewhat isolated and disconnected.

Having experienced this problem themselves multiple times – Simon and Matt set out to build Plain, an API-first customer service platform for companies big and small. Plain is the customer service platform for companies that build.

With this in mind, Plain is now on a mission to bring together engineering and customer service. They believe that great customer service is powered by great tooling, and that today, building great tools for customer service is too hard, too time intensive, and too complex. Plain exists to remove those barriers – put simply, Plain is CS without the BS.