About Parley
We make support feel like a conversation.
Parley is a small company in Minneapolis and Lisbon building the helpdesk we wished our friends had.
Parley started in a bike shop. Our friend ran support for it from a shared mailbox, a chat tool and a spreadsheet of “people we owe a reply”. Every Monday, somebody found a message from Friday that nobody had answered.
We built the first version over a winter: one list for every channel, sorted by what was due next. It was plain, and it worked, and soon the bakery next door wanted it too.
Today Parley is a helpdesk for teams of three to fifty — shops, studios and software companies who’d rather sound like themselves than like a ticket system. We still build it in two inks: as few colors, settings and clicks as the job allows.
- teams answer customers in Parley
- 3,200
- countries
- 41
- people at Parley, in two offices
- 38
- the winter it started
- 2021
How we work
Four things we won't trade away.
- 01Answer like a person
Every default we ship — macros, bot replies, survey emails — is written to sound like a good colleague, not a ticket system.
- 02Small teams first
We design for the three-person team juggling email and chat. If it works for them, it scales; the reverse is rarely true.
- 03Timers you can trust
An SLA that's wrong once is ignored forever. We'd rather ship a feature late than ship a number that lies.
- 04Print it in two inks
Fewer colors, fewer settings, fewer clicks. When we add something, we look for two things to take away.
Timeline
Six winters.
2021
Wren and Tomás build a shared inbox for a friend's bike shop over a long winter.
2022
Parley opens to the public with email, chat and a help center. 40 teams sign up in the first month.
2023
SLA policies, business hours and the first version of Pip, the answer bot.
2024
Social and phone channels. 1,000 teams answer customers in Parley every day.
2025
Automations, the Scale plan and an office in Lisbon.
2026
Reports rebuilt from scratch, the macro picker and 3,200 teams across 41 countries.
Team
The people behind the ink.
Wren Halvorsen
Co-founder, CEO
Minneapolis
Tomás Oyelaran
Co-founder, CTO
Lisbon
Margit Szabo
Head of Design
Budapest
Kwame Asante
Head of Customer Success
Toronto
Lucía Ferrante
Engineering Lead, Inbox
Remote
Benedikt Aalto
Engineering Lead, Pip
Helsinki
Joy Nakamura
Support Lead (we use Parley too)
Minneapolis
Ravi Chandrasekar
Product Manager, Reports
Remote
Come and try it on.
The demo workspace is open — no sign-up needed. Or start a trial with your own inbox.
14 days of Growth · No card · Up to 10 agents