Pesto (formerly Pragli) provides an avatar-driven digital workplace where employees use customizable avatars and organized virtual rooms for audio-first collaboration, screenshare, video, games and spatial features. The founders began developing the idea in 2019 and made the company official a year later. Its product aims to sit between text chat and formal video conferencing by restoring informal, unplanned interactions and reducing “Zoom fatigue.” The company reports working with more than 10,000 teams and users have logged over 100 million voice and video minutes. Pesto is currently free to users but plans to introduce a paid tier later in the year. It has eight employees and does not disclose revenue or profitability. Pragli is a virtual office application that maps real-world presence cues into an online workplace using customizable avatars that indicate desk/away/meeting/in‑the‑zone states and support quick audio, video and screenshare interactions. The app includes channels, a virtual water cooler, guest web and mobile access, and integrations for Spotify and calendars; it can infer presence from mouse/keyboard activity or occasional webcam snapshots. The founders — Doug Safreno and Vivek Nair, both Stanford CS grads who previously built and sold StacksWare to Avi Networks — built and released a beta last year with no other full‑time employees. Usage reportedly grew 6X in March and is up 20X since January 1. Pragli officially launched and is free until June 1, after which it plans to adopt a freemium model with the full experience reserved for companies that pay per user per month. The team is working on a full‑fledged mobile app and is focused on reducing communication friction, loneliness and lack of boundaries for remote workers. Long‑term the founders aim for Pragli to offer the spontaneity of office interactions while keeping remote work flexible and less distracting than existing tools.

Total raised

$5M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

Feb 2022