Unthread has a plan to clean up Slack and will showcase its technology at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

If every good startup starts with a problem, this one might have started with a bad conversation on Slack. As CEO and co-founder Tom Bashant says, he remembers seeing the chaos of Slack-based support — random tickets, a jumble of direct messages, and little opportunity for insight into underlying problems.

“The first point was just seeing that Slack was just a messy beast that needed better tracking, and then seeing that the actual work these teams required could easily be automated,” Bashant recalls.

His new company, Unthread, is a result of this realization. The company builds native, AI-powered Slack support bots for high-profile clients like Intuit, Lemonade, and Automattic. The goal is to automatically fix a large portion of issues and redirect other issues to specific support tickets. But more than just a custom Slackbot builder, Bashant and his team believe they’ve discovered a new way to track down issues that slow down businesses — and fix them before they become a problem.

Unthread is a finalist for TechCrunch Disrupt 2025’s Top 20 Startup Battlefield Games.

Sometimes that means interoperating with ticketing systems like Jira and Zendesk, but more often, it means replacing them. The flexibility of the AI-based model means Unthread can also build systems for HR, legal or finance departments. Once Unthread is in place to monitor reported issues, the team can start automating more tasks, ultimately creating a self-updating knowledge base for the entire company.

Much of this process is guided by contemporary AI tools, which lie at the heart of Unthread’s technology stack, providing the flexibility needed to address a wide range of problems at scale. But an important part of Unthread’s value is just the basic organization of the ticketing system, implemented on a modern enterprise communications platform. “LLMS has changed the way people use our product, but ultimately it has not changed the problem we are solving,” Bashant said.

Bashant has had a long road to get to this point. His first startup, founded right out of college, was a ride-sharing system called Dashride, aimed at finding drunk college kids a safe way home. After acquiring that company in 2018, Cruz founded an HR startup before settling on the Slack-based support problem. He now leads a lean team of 10 people in New York, expanding Unthread’s mandate while serving clients.

The trick to longevity, he says, is to stay focused on the people using your product. “We were only able to do this because we were having a lot of conversations with customers,” Bashant says. “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, helped us make a lot of decisions.”

If you want to learn more about Unthread from the company itself — while also checking out dozens of other companies, hearing their ideas, and hearing from guest speakers at four different stages — join us at Disrupt, October 27-29 in San Francisco. Learn more here.