Advith Chelikani

Advith Chelikani is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Pylon, a B2B customer support platform headquartered in San Francisco.^[14] He co-founded the company in November 2022 alongside Marty Kausas and Robert Eng, and the three entered Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch.^[10][13] Pylon has raised $51 million in venture capital from General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, and Bain Capital Ventures, and serves more than 780 B2B customers.^[2][19]

Before founding Pylon, Chelikani spent four years at Samsara, the IoT and fleet management company, where he rose to senior software engineer and team lead on the developer ecosystem and platform team.^[12][17] He graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 2018 with a bachelor's degree in computer science, and was selected as a Kleiner Perkins Engineering Fellow in 2017 — a program whose alumni have gone on to found Figma, Retool, and OpenSea.^[12][18] It was through the fellowship, which placed him at Slack Technologies, that Chelikani first met Kausas.^[18]

In 2025, Pylon was named to the Enterprise Tech 30 list at No. 8 in the early-stage category.^[20] All three co-founders were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the artificial intelligence category for 2026.^[11][5]

Chelikani began coding in middle school by building websites and developed an interest in software through robotics competitions in high school.^[13] He attended the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a selective residential public high school in Aurora, Illinois, from 2011 to 2014.^[12]

He enrolled at the California Institute of Technology in 2014 and graduated in 2018 with a B.S. in computer science.^[12] At Caltech, Chelikani co-led Hacktech, the university's intercollegiate hackathon, from 2015 to 2017 alongside Robert Eng, who would later become his co-founder at Pylon.^[12] During the summer of 2015, he served as an undergraduate research fellow at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he worked on server-side software for the Global Imagery Browse Services system and presented his research at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.^[12]

In 2016, Chelikani interned on the product engineering team at Nutanix, the enterprise cloud infrastructure company.^[12] The following summer, he was selected as one of approximately 50 Kleiner Perkins Engineering Fellows from more than 2,500 applicants.^[12] The fellowship placed him at Slack Technologies, where he worked on performance infrastructure and enterprise product — experience that gave him direct exposure to how enterprise teams used Slack for communication.^[12][18] He also interned on the backend infrastructure team at Coursera from September to December 2017.^[12]

Samsara (2018–2022)

After graduating from Caltech in 2018, Chelikani joined Samsara, the IoT and fleet management platform that went public on the NYSE in December 2021.^[12][17] Over four years, he rose to senior software engineer and team lead on the developer ecosystem and platform team, building and managing engineering teams focused on scalable platform infrastructure and developer tooling.^[12] General Catalyst's investment memo on Pylon later cited Chelikani's Samsara background as evidence of the founding team's engineering depth.^[17]

During his tenure at Samsara, Chelikani also participated in hiring panels for customer support roles, giving him early exposure to the operational challenges of scaling B2B support teams — a problem he would later build a company around.^[18] He departed in mid-2022 to co-found Pylon.^[12]

Pylon (2022–present)

Chelikani co-founded Pylon in November 2022 with Marty Kausas, whom he had met through the Kleiner Perkins Fellowship, and Robert Eng, his classmate from Caltech.^[10][18] The founding insight came from observing that B2B companies were increasingly managing customer relationships through shared Slack channels and Microsoft Teams rather than email, but no existing support platform was built for that reality.^[10][1]

The company entered Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch, initially focused on a connector product that integrated Slack and Teams messages into existing ticketing systems.^[10][13] In July 2023, TechCrunch reported on the company's $3.2 million seed round, led by General Catalyst.^[10][17] At the time, Pylon's product was narrowly scoped: it allowed support teams to triage and respond to customer messages arriving through Slack Connect channels without leaving their existing tools.^[10]

The company's scope expanded over the following year. By August 2024, Pylon had grown to approximately 250 customers and 14 employees, and had broadened from an omnichannel connector into a full-service B2B support platform encompassing ticketing, customer success, knowledge base, and AI-assisted workflows.^[1] Andreessen Horowitz led a $17 million Series A, with partner Jennifer Li — who had participated in the same Kleiner Perkins Fellowship program as the founders — joining the board.^[1][16][18]

In August 2025, Pylon announced a $31 million Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital Ventures, bringing total funding to $51 million.^[2][3][15] The company reported more than 780 customers, revenue growth exceeding five times year-over-year for two consecutive years, and more than 150 companies that had migrated from incumbents including Zendesk and Intercom.^[15][19] Pylon's customer base included Together AI, Cognition, Temporal, AssemblyAI, Hightouch, Deel, and Applied Intuition.^[15][19] The company had grown to approximately 120 employees, all working from a fully in-person San Francisco office.^[1][13]

As CTO, Chelikani oversees engineering and product development. The company has shipped three AI product lines: agents that the company says reduce ticket volume by 50 percent, assistants that accelerate support workflows, and an account intelligence product that generates signals from customer interactions.^[19][15] Forbes described Pylon as a "self-described Zendesk-killer" that "responds to complex customer service inquiries, drafts replies and automates renewals."^[11]

In the company's early days, the three co-founders lived together in a windowless San Francisco apartment and worked from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week, a schedule they maintained even after raising tens of millions of dollars.^[4][9] They were the lowest-paid employees at the company throughout its early history.^[4]

In December 2025, Chelikani was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the artificial intelligence category for 2026, alongside co-founders Kausas and Eng.^[11][5] He was one of six Indian-origin founders recognized in the AI category that year.^[5][6]

Pylon was ranked No. 8 in the early-stage category of the 2025 Enterprise Tech 30 list, which is selected by more than 100 venture investors to identify private companies expected to change how enterprises operate.^[20]

In 2017, Chelikani was selected as a Kleiner Perkins Engineering Fellow, a program that accepts approximately 50 applicants from a pool of more than 2,500.^[12]

Chelikani is of Indian origin and is based in San Francisco.^[5][12] He has described himself as someone who loves games of all kinds — board games, sports, and video games.^[12] In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he designed and launched a Kickstarter campaign for "Consensus," a social card game, which reached 250 percent of its funding goal.^[12]