Electric made IT support chat-first and raised a $9.25M Series A

Electric entered a fragmented IT-support market: more than 100,000 independent consultancies served about one million small businesses, many without full-time IT staff. The prevailing model was expensive, slow and reactive, delivered in person or by phone.

Ryan Denehy's decision was to make support chat-first inside Slack and combine AI-driven automation with human technicians. Electric focused automation on the most repetitive requests—about half of support tickets, such as setting up email or connecting an enterprise platform—and escalated harder cases to people.

The change produced early traction: within 14 months of launch, Electric had grown to dozens of employees and low seven-figure annual revenue. A $9.25 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners then gave the company capital to pursue at least four-fold growth in recurring revenue and customers.

Electric reached low seven-figure annual revenue and dozens of employees in 14 months, then raised a $9.25M Series A to scale.

Small and medium-sized businesses often lacked full-time IT staff and faced a fragmented provider market.

Slack put support in the workflow where employees already asked for help, rather than making them wait for a visit or phone call.

Automating routine requests could improve speed while human escalation preserved coverage for complex problems.

Early revenue and customer growth made the chat-first model credible enough to attract a major Series A investor.

When a routine service is slow and fragmented, put the interaction where customers already work, automate repeatable tasks, and keep humans for exceptions.

Electric planned to grow recurring revenue and customers at least four-fold while scaling engineering and product, sales and marketing, and IT experts without compromising customer service. The source does not document whether that plan was achieved; the documented result is a chat-first, human-assisted model with low-seven-figure revenue and $9.25M of new capital.