Support and sales talked to the same customers, on different tools
Support and sales have always run on separate tools, even though they talk to the same customers. That sentence, from Open's own launch post for Open for Sales, is the whole company in miniature. A prospect who replies to a sales campaign becomes a support conversation; a support customer with a new need becomes a sales opportunity. Every time the conversation crosses from one system to another, context is lost, the customer repeats themselves, and the company looks like two companies that happen to share a logo.
Mo Gharbat, Open's founder and CEO, built the company to end that split. Open — originally OpenCX — is an AI-native customer communication platform that automates the end-to-end stack: support, phone calling, inbound and outbound, across voice, chat, email and messaging. The pitch is not a better chatbot. It is a single engine that understands context across channels, acts in real time, and keeps improving — so that a team never has to stitch tools together to talk to its own customers.
Level 2 and 3, not FAQs
The founding problem was specific, and that specificity is why the company worked. In high-volume industries — airlines, banks, fast-growing startups — many businesses struggled to handle complex customer inquiries with human staff alone, and their answer was to redirect people to generic articles instead of giving personalised assistance. Customers were frustrated, and the companies knew it; they just had no system that could resolve a level 2 or level 3 issue — the kind that needs systems access, judgement and follow-through — without a human doing it by hand.
Open's answer was a proprietary AI platform with its own in-house reasoning engine, designed to resolve those intricate issues autonomously and to merge what had been three separate software tools into one offering. The company says its customers now automate 77% of their customer interactions on average, and that its engine automates more than 70% of the end-to-end communication stack. Those are company figures, and they should be read as such — but they explain the shape of the ambition: not deflection for its own sake, but resolution of the cases other tools gave up on.
Two rounds, one engine
The funding followed the same disciplined path. In January 2025 Open closed a $1.52 million pre-seed round led by Y Combinator, with participation from Spacetime, Mollie CEO Koen Köppen, Pioneer Fund and others. A year later, in January 2026, it announced a $7 million round led by Y Combinator — participating for the second time — with X by Unifonic, Shorooq and Sadu Capital, as it prepared to expand into the Gulf. The company says it had onboarded recognisable brands including MoneyGram, Mollie, Viva and TicketSwap in its first year live, and that it chose deliberately to focus on brands with high-complexity, high-stakes support needs — the environments many other players shy away from.
Gharbat, who co-founded the company with Mohammad Tabaza, has described the goal from day one as simple and ambitious: empower companies with the best AI customer support agent and engine in the world. The second round was framed not as a new direction but as going deeper — a better, faster engine, available everywhere, on the way to one super-engine powering the entire customer experience.
One prompt, one campaign
Open for Sales, launched on Product Hunt in October 2026, is the outbound half of that engine. Give Companion your products and a CSV of contacts, and it checks every persona, scores fit, and writes an editable sequence across calls, email and WhatsApp, then builds a live dashboard — audience, contacted, in progress, replied, a step-by-step view, a breakdown by channel and the latest replies — to track it. It is built for founders and small teams who need a real multi-channel campaign without an ops hire, and for SDR teams who want the agent to make the first touch so they can spend their time on the people who reply.
The detail that matters most is what does not happen: the conversation does not move to another system when a prospect replies. They keep talking to the same AI, with the same knowledge, on the same channel, and when it is time for a person, the team picks it up with full context. Every AI decision is visible, every message editable. It connects to Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce, HubSpot, Freshdesk, Twilio Flex, Zapier, Make and n8n, plus a REST API, an MCP server and webhooks, and is GDPR-compliant with EU data residency and automatic PII redaction.
The super-engine thesis
Open's vision, stated plainly in its funding announcement, is that Open becomes the only software a team needs to communicate with its customers using AI — phone, email, SMS, WhatsApp, web chat, inbound or outbound, support, sales, operations or any other customer-facing use case. It is a big claim, and like all platform claims it will be judged on whether the single engine really is better than the stitched alternatives, not on whether the diagram looks elegant.
But the sequence so far is coherent in a way that makes the claim worth taking seriously: solve the hardest support cases first, prove it on demanding customers, raise twice from the same lead investor, and only then turn the engine outward. Open for Sales is not a pivot into sales tools. It is the same engine, pointed at the customers a company does not have yet — with the same rule that made the support side work: the conversation stays in one place, and the human stays in charge of what goes out.
The playbook
- Solve level 3, and level 1 takes care of itself — Open's founding insight was that the hardest support problems — level 2 and 3 issues in airlines, banks and fast-growing startups — were being redirected to generic articles instead of solved. Solving the hard case first made the easy cases trivial.
- One engine beats two handoffs — Support and sales talked to the same customers on different tools, losing context at every handoff. Open's bet is that one engine, with context carried across channels, beats two best-of-breed tools that cannot talk to each other.
- The agent drafts, the team decides — Every call brief, email template and WhatsApp message in Open for Sales stays editable. The agent drafts; the team decides. Nothing goes out that a human cannot change.
- Win the demanding customers first — Open raised from Y Combinator twice — pre-seed, then again leading the $7 million round — by proving the engine on demanding, regulated customers first: MoneyGram, Mollie, Viva, TicketSwap.
- Aim for the whole experience, not a feature — Open's stated destination is a single super-engine for the entire customer experience — phone, email, SMS, WhatsApp, web chat, inbound or outbound — so a team never stitches tools together again.