Spotlight

What if your team’s messaging platform actually understood your business and could act on it?

Quick Pitch:  Ping is an AI native team messaging platform with a persistent memory layer that lets humans and AI agents operate from shared context. It combines familiar team chat with AI that searches across messages, documents, email, calendars, and work tools, then takes action directly from the conversation.

The Problem

• Context Switching: Knowledge workers lose hours daily moving between email, chat, docs, calendars, and project tools.

• AI Tool Sprawl: Each new AI assistant creates another silo instead of reducing work.

• Shallow Intelligence: Chat tools lack business context. Search tools retrieve information but cannot collaborate or act.

Snapshot

• Industry: AI-native collaboration and productivity

• Headquarters: Sunnyvale, California

• Year Founded: 2025

• Traction: Active pilot discussions with larger organizations and a strong waitlist driven by a single organic LinkedIn post

Founder Profiles

• Peter Griggs, Co-Founder, CEO: 2x AI founder, built DeepAI to #26 globally on a16z rankings. Former Director of Product at Deepgram.

• Mel Foody,Co-Founder, CTO: Former VP at Meta and executive leader at Instagram from 2017 to 2025. Previously spent a decade as a Director at Google.

Funding

• Current Round: Raising $500K (Pre-Seed)

Revenue Engine

• Pricing Model: Per seat subscription with usage based AI pricing

• Free Tier: Unlimited members, core integrations, limited AI usage

• Pro Tier: ~$20 per user plus usage

• Max Tier: ~$100 per user plus usage for full workspace indexing and advanced agent workflows

What Users Love

• One chat interface that replaces app switching

• AI that understands company wide context

• Ability to ask questions and execute workflows in the same place

• Security aligned with existing user permissions

Playing Field

• Slack/Teams: Messaging platforms with add on AI that lacks deep context and cannot orchestrate actions

• Glean/Guru: Strong enterprise search but limited collaboration and execution

• ChatGPT Team/Claude: Built for individuals, not shared team workflows with persistent context

Why It Matters

As AI adoption accelerates, team collaboration remains fragmented. Most organizations still work across disconnected tools with no shared intelligence layer. The market is shifting toward AI that lives inside everyday workflows, retaining context across conversations and actions, and shaping how teams operate day to day.

What Sets Them Apart

• Persistent Memory Layer: Indexes across connected services so users do not need to know where information lives.

• Chat Native Execution: Answers questions and takes action from the same interface.

• AI Native Foundation: Designed for agent workflows from day one, not added later to legacy software.

Analysis

Bulls Case 📈 

• Addresses a large, well understood productivity problem with real economic cost.

• The founding team has rare, relevant experience across AI, product, and large scale platforms.

• Persistent memory creates defensibility that competitors would need to rebuild core systems to replicate.

Bears Case 📉 

• Requires behavior change and displacement of deeply entrenched tools.

• Execution risk around maintaining reliable, deep integrations across many enterprise systems.

• A crowded market with well funded incumbents makes differentiation harder to communicate.

Verdict

Ping is rethinking collaboration around persistent memory and action. The core insight is architectural. By anchoring AI inside team chat, Ping captures intent, in progress discussions, and evolving context rather than static documents. Over time, this memory compounds, improving relevance, automation, and workflow orchestration. At this early stage, the bet is as much on founder market fit and execution as it is on the product itself.

The Startup Pulse

Another happening week in startup funding. Strong activity across AI infrastructure, hospitality tech, education, and developer tooling.

• Duve — Raised $60M Series B led by Susquehanna Growth Equity to scale its AI driven hotel guest platform, focused on checkins, upsells, and guest communication.

• Runware — Closed a $50M Series A led by Dawn Capital to build an API platform for AI infrastructure, simplifying access to compute, models, and orchestration for developers.

• Solve Intelligence — Raised $40M Series B co led by Visionaries VC and 20VC, with participation from Thomson Reuters Ventures, to automate patent and IP workflows through its Charts product.

Read more

Until Next Time

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