Pancake is a superagent that makes your company autonomous, running squads of agents that work while you sleep. They needed an inbox the agent fully owned, not a founder's personal address. Shipped in a day.
Company: Pancake, the superagent that makes your company autonomous
Problem: Give the agent a clean, programmatic inbox it owns directly, so it can talk to customers, leads, and vendors without founders forwarding emails or sharing credentials
Result: Zero-touch email threads handled autonomously as part of a squad workflow. Response times dropped from hours to minutes, founder time on comms overhead went to near zero, and it shipped in a day.
Stack: AgentMail + Pancake
What Pancake Is
Pancake is a superagent that makes your company autonomous. It connects to your tools, creates agents, and starts working for you, even while you're asleep, and it's already trusted by 600+ companies.
The shape of the product is squads. You assemble agents into a squad and point them at a job, Outreach with a Lead Researcher, Sequence Writer, and Reply Handler, or AI SEO, GitHub Triage, Google Ads, Reddit, Meta Ads, and PostHog. The agents live in Slack, where they don't wait to be asked. They post the morning briefing, flag the one thing that needs a human, and keep working in the background. It's built secure by design: sandboxed pods, least-privilege access, approval gates on anything destructive, and secrets sealed in a vault.
The squads that matter most here are the ones that reach outside the company. Outreach and support don't live inside Slack. They live in email.
The Problem
Pancake's users wanted their agent to communicate with the outside world, customers, leads, and vendors, not just inside Slack. That meant a real inbox.
The constraint was ownership. The agent needed a clean, programmatic inbox it controlled directly, without asking founders to forward emails or share credentials. Routing external mail through a founder's personal address breaks the moment you're running squads 24/7 without a human in the loop. Every external email becomes a relay: the founder reads it, hands the context to the agent, copies the reply back out. That's not autonomous.
Why AgentMail
AgentMail was the only solution designed for agents, not humans.
"It's the only solution designed for agents, not humans. No OAuth dance, no personal account, no forwarding rules. Each agent gets a real address, reads its own mail, and replies in context, exactly the primitive we needed to make fully autonomous outreach and support squads work. Shipped in a day."
Will Marquis, Co-Founder and CEO, Pancake
What made it fit: programmatic inboxes map directly onto how Pancake already provisions everything else per workspace, each inbox scoped to a pod and isolated by tenant. No shared credentials, no human in the loop.
On the experience: a minimal API that does what it says.
"Minimal API, does what it says. When we hit an edge case the team responded fast with a real answer. That matters when you're shipping squads that run 24/7 without human oversight."
Will Marquis, Co-Founder and CEO, Pancake
The Numbers
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| External email | Founder manually relays context to the agent, copies replies | Zero-touch, the agent handles the full thread autonomously |
| Where it runs | Routed through a founder's personal address | A real inbox the agent fully owns, scoped to a pod |
| Response time | Hours | Minutes |
| Founder time on comms | Ongoing overhead | Near zero |
"AgentMail is what gives Pancake a presence in the world. Our agent doesn't just work inside Slack, it has a real identity, a real inbox, and can reach anyone, anywhere. It's what makes Pancake feel alive to the people it works with."
Will Marquis, Co-Founder and CEO, Pancake
Products used: Programmatic inboxes, Send and Receive, Threaded conversations, Webhooks, Multi-tenancy (Pods).
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