The Venture Codex

Participated · Seed · May 2021

Café is a French startup that helps hybrid organizations coordinate when team members come into the office using a people-first calendar view. Founded by two brothers—co-founders Tom Nguyen (CEO) and Arthur Lorotte de Banes (CTO)—the product avoids traditional desk-booking and instead shows team member statuses and groupings to simplify planning. It offers mobile and web apps, Slack integration so Slack status reflects Café status, and is building HRIS integrations such as PayFit to sync vacations. Features include a simplified calendar, custom statuses, admin weekly reminders, and analytics like average office headcount by day. Café follows a freemium model with customers including Livestorm, Jellysmack and Yubo, and the company expects employees to drive wider adoption inside organizations. The startup raised a $1 million seed round from a mix of investors and angels.

Led · Seed · Oct 2020

Orgnostic provides a people-analytics platform that ingests and unifies data from disparate HR and financial tools to bridge operations and employee experience. The service maps and types HR and financial data into a single model, offering both data collection and new data generation for people teams. Orgnostic says its ingestion process from multiple HR sources has been reduced from six weeks to three hours. The platform integrates data from sources including BambooHR, Lever, Lattice, Betterworks, Personio, Bob, Greenhouse, Teamtailor, Recruitee, Workable and Timetastic. The startup launched its initial product eight months before this round and plans to use the seed funding to rapidly accelerate further development of the platform. Co-founder Luka Babic highlighted time pressure and organisational debt as drivers for the product, citing risks to effectiveness, culture, and employee retention. Orgnostic offers an HR analytics platform that layers theory and practical expertise onto clients' raw aggregated HR data to produce strategic organisational insights. The company’s platform and diagnostic algorithm are built on 30 years of academic research and a database covering over 10,000 companies and more than 25,000,000 records. Its assessment framework incorporates established methods such as the Denison Culture Model and Hackman’s Team Effectiveness Diagnostics. Orgnostic has partnered with academic researchers from Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, and with organisational design practitioners. The startup was founded by Luka Babic and Igor Bogicevic and is focused on linking organisational dynamics with companies’ bottom lines to create more sustainable businesses. It recently raised $900K (approx €767K) in a pre-seed round and plans to use the funding to strengthen its team and scale the analytics platform.

Led · Seed · Jul 2020

Swoop provides a cloud-based platform that lets local limo, shuttle and charter bus companies book and dispatch rides, track vehicles in real time, communicate with riders, and manage payments and bookkeeping from one dashboard. The software also funnels demand from enterprise clients such as Airbnb, Google and Nike directly to participating operators, helping boost vehicle utilization, which the company says averages just 4.9% across the industry. In response to COVID-19, Swoop has added features that allow operators to repurpose idle fleets for tasks like food wholesaling, local package delivery and shuttling essential factory workers for customers such as Amazon. Targeting an estimated $40 billion U.S. group transportation market in which no single operator holds more than 1% share, the startup’s long-term goal is to modernize thousands of pen-and-paper “mom-and-pop” fleets. CEO and co-founder Amir Ghorbani drew on experience in his parents’ limousine business to identify the opportunity and build the initial booking marketplace. The company is currently ramping up its SaaS offering with the fresh seed capital and has not disclosed revenue or user counts to date.

Led · Seed · Jul 2020

Replenysh is a Los Angeles, CA-based recycling logistics startup led by CEO Mark Armen. The company provides a materials system that enables brands to create resilient circular supply chains at scale by identifying, generating, and verifying new sources of materials. Its platform turns everyday locations — such as amphitheaters, hotels, bars and restaurants, and warehouses — into intelligent material collection hubs and connects them directly with processors and brands. Consumer brands use the system to secure material inputs and gain visibility into their circular material programs. Replenysh intends to use the Series A proceeds to expand operations and development efforts. Replenysh offers a software dashboard for U.S. recycling centers to discover rates, gain price transparency, automate workflows, and schedule shipments while providing buyer-side tools for brands to find and secure recycled materials. The company says it already has relationships with hundreds of recycling centers and connects them with buyers from large retailers and brands (buyer names not disclosed). Replenysh began pilots in 2016 and incorporated last year; the team is lean, with eight employees and one intern. The startup’s product targets the fiscal inefficiencies of recycling—where recycling can be up to three times more expensive than landfilling a ton of material—and aims to build a new digital supply chain to make reuse more economical. The company plans to further build out its technologies and its network to support brands' commitments to adopt recycled materials and to scale material circulation through its platform.

Participated · Series A · Jun 2020

Anvil offers a paperwork automation platform that combines APIs and no-code tooling to collect data, generate PDFs, and capture e-signatures inside applications. The product targets workflows across HR, insurance, financial services, legal, education, real estate, and healthcare. Recent product enhancements include conditional logic, lists, hidden fields, multi-field editing, and enterprise features such as SSO, custom CSS white-labeling, detailed audit trails, multiple API keys, and embeddable Workflow and Template Builders. Customers integrate Anvil’s Workflows directly into their applications or Salesforce instances to drive internal adoption and seamless client experiences; insurtechs like Ascend and Vouch have used the platform to launch dozens of insurance products quickly. The company plans to use the new capital to pursue enterprise customers, expand market growth, and grow the team. Leadership is led by founder and CEO Mang-Git Ng. Anvil is a San Francisco, CA-based provider of a low-code paperwork automation platform. Led by CEO Mang-Git Ng, the platform enables businesses to quickly build simple online experiences for paperwork processes. It can be applied to any existing paperwork process and serves customers across financial services, human resources, technology and healthcare. The company raised $5M in a Series A round and intends to use the funds to expand operations. The article reporting the raise lists customers across multiple industries but does not disclose revenue or user metrics.