I know Andrei and have been following him and the team since they started. Great service. Incidentally they're an Erlang shop that uses release upgrades to do seamless code deploys without losing a chat session. Impressive.

Generally speaking it never ceases to amaze me how many of these chat platforms are but often they tend not to be compatible to XMPP protocol.

We built Kato from product down, trying to avoid protocol-driven pitfalls. We'll add an integration sooner than later.

Cool it would be nice to be able to connect your own XMPP server.

So the only differentiator is that you can tile multiple chat windows? Of course I haven't tried it yet, but that feels like it would be overwhelming.

That, and vim-like keyboard shortcuts (https://kato.im/articles/keyboard-control/)

And ability to use the same account to work with multiple teams at the same time.

Also markdown support.

That was my initial concern, but I've been chatting with a couple friends to try it out, as well as chatting with the founder. As it turns out, it's not confusing at all. It's a really FUN app to use. And the Vim-like keybindings are amazing.

I'm in love with a cat.

Also cross-org communication. If you're not into chatting with external parties, then think about how you would otherwise connect teams in a 500+ person company. I've tried a lot of tools but couldn't find anything that works when companies scale in size.

Question: Why are there so many new chat platforms coming out? Isn't this problem pretty well figured out by now?

Nah. People still live in email.

IM and email are different things. People still use email because IM is not meant to replace it.

I think IM is a bit of a misnomer when applied to products like Kato. Persistence, sync across devices, and instant search make it a lot more like "multi-person, temporally-organized Evernote, with real-time feedback", which is closer to replacing email than IM.

For what it's worth, the Kato team so far hasn't sent a single internal email over the history of the company. (We're distributed across ~15 cities.)

We use both because both have reason to exist. Since I started working in a multinational company spread across different sites (and continents) I have appreciated both approaches: sometimes the chat is a quick way to ask something, to verify that something is working etc.. compared to mail (that is not always seen "in time") or using the phone (as a bonus points, IMHO for non-english speakers it is easier to chat than to talk...)

Great job, Andrei and Peter!