Topic: Founder Stories

Today, Pear’s portfolio company OnRamp announced its $14.2 million in funding across a seed and Series A round, led by Javelin Venture Partners and Contour Venture Partners, with Quiet Capital, Correlation, Flybridge and angels Louis Beryl, Claire Hughes Johnson, and Steve Fredette. 

We first met OnRamp’s Co-founder and COO, Ross Lerner, when he was an MBA student at Harvard Business School. As we got to know Ross and his Co-founder and CEO Paul Holder, we were convinced of the critical onboarding problem they aimed to solve—an issue we had frequently observed within our own portfolio companies. 

The B2B customer onboarding process is a significant pain point for many companies, often leading to delays in revenue recognition and decreased customer satisfaction. OnRamp addresses this underserved market by automating and streamlining the post-sales process, which is crucial for accelerating value, reducing costs, and protecting revenue. 

OnRamp transforms a traditionally cumbersome task into a seamless experience through a no-code customer portal that allows businesses to automate complex onboarding workflows. This solution means any deal team or account relationship stakeholders can collaborate to reduce time to value for its customers and improve customer engagement and visibility.

Ross presented OnRamp to a handpicked investor audience at the PearX S22 demo day ahead of closing OnRamp’s seed round. Along the way, we’ve loved working with Paul and Ross on key hires, especially in building out pipeline and closing candidates in engineering and go-to-market roles.

Pear has also been a partner to OnRamp as they have expanded their product offerings to best serve large enterprises. We couldn’t be more proud that OnRamp now counts three of the Fortune 15 as its customers, serving industry leaders like Cardinal Health, CVS Health, and McKesson. OnRamp has tripled its revenue in each of the past three years and is on track to do so again this year, meaning that Paul and Ross have had plenty of opportunity to become power users of their own product. 

To book a demo with OnRamp, visit onramp.us and experience firsthand how they can transform your customer onboarding process!

Today, PearX S20 alum Seven Starling announced a $10.9M Series A round to expand access to specialized women’s healthcare. The round was led by RH Capital and supported by Pear, Emerson Collective, March of Dimes, and others. 

We’ve been backers of Seven Starling since day one of their company, and we’re excited to double down on them in this round. Not only have they proven to be an unwavering team but they have built an important and high growth business.

We met the Seven Starling founding team (Tina Keshani, Sophia Ritcher and Julia Cole) over a Zoom call in March 2020. At the time, they were students at Harvard Business school working on a startup called June Motherhood at the time, an on-demand support service for expecting mothers, providing personalized care at home and online throughout pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood. 

Ten days after our first meeting, COVID-19 shutdowns began. Despite the uncertainty at that moment in time, we decided to not only award them the Pear Competition, but also to invite them to join our PearX S20 cohort. 

Here are a few characteristics that made Seven Starling stand out to us:

• Exceptional consumer DNA: The Co-founders, Tina Beilinson (CEO), Sophia Richter (CPO), and Julia Cole (COO), were a fantastic group. They were exceptional, clear thinkers and communicators, scrappy operators that had spent months researching the space, and had strong consumer DNA, having worked at great consumer brands like Warby Parker and Kind.
• Proof of execution. During the time in business school the team had tirelessly worked to validate their idea. By the time we met them, they had built a no-code prototype and had enrolled their first patients. 
• Strong mission and product vision: Seven Starling took flight to help women navigate the most meaningful transitions in their life.
• Untapped opportunity in Women’s Health: 33 million suffer from mental health conditions every year. Women are also 2x more likely to suffer from depression than men. Just last year, one in three new mothers suffered from perinatal mood disorders. Maternal mortality in the US is higher than our peer countries and is actually worsening. According to the CDC, the number one leading cause of maternal deaths in the US is undiagnosed mental health problems. Seven Starling saw this gap four years ago and has reinvented the clinical standard for women’s behavioral health.

The summer of PearX S20, we worked together over Zoom. In just 12 weeks, they built an app, closed key partnerships and achieved their first revenue. They closed a Seed round right after demo day that included Pear alongside top-tier VCs such as  Emerson Collective, Magnify Ventures, and Expa. They were off to the races. 

Our partnership with Seven Starling went beyond PearX. We’ve worked closely with their team over the last four years to help them build the foundations of a long lasting company. Here are some of the ways we partnered with Seven Starling over the last four years:

Navigating to product market fit and working through a pivot:

A year after PearX, we realized that scaling the initial product was not going as planned. Despite the customer love, the acquisition costs were too high and healthy unit economics seemed elusive. We had a difficult call where we aligned that “it was not working” and decided to iterate again on the product. We worked together very closely for a few months and we went back to listening to the customers. As part of this exercise, we realized our most loyal customers were looking for mental health support. OB-GYNS were also desperate for solutions for their patients – most couldn’t offer that mental health support themselves. 

We decided to initially focus on a very narrow value proposition: maternal mental health. Then, we figured out that we also needed to innovate in the acquisition channel. We partnered with OB-GYNs to build a trusted referral network that delivered high intention patients.

By focusing on a large but narrow value proposition ($8B+ maternal mental health market), we achieved product market fit and Seven Starling can now effectively grow into the nearly $55B+ women’s mental health opportunity. By innovating in the acquisition channel, we were able to grow rapidly with little cash spent: today 90%+ of Seven Starling’s patients are acquired through OB-GYN referrals, a key wedge into this market. A core value proposition to Seven Starling’s patients and referring providers is that they’re in-network with most major health plans including UnitedHealthcare, Cigna, Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, and Blue Cross Blue Shield. 

Hiring: 

Our team has helped Seven Starling make critical hires. Early on, our partner Vivien introduced them to a key advisor: Dr. Amy Roskin. She was so bought into the team’s vision, she joined as their Chief Medical Officer in 2022. Amy was an OB-GYN for over 20 years, was previously the CMO of The Pill Club, and was also an attorney who specialized in Telemedicine law. Laura from our Talent team also jumped into hiring for Seven Starling, helping them hire their founding engineer. This was their first technical hire and they’ve had a tremendous impact on their journey.

Fundraising: 

Since we started our partnership, we have helped the Seven Starling team navigate each of their fundraising rounds from  determining the fundraising strategy, to pitch creation to coming up with the target investor list. We are happy to have a phenomenal group of investors around the table, all of which believe deeply in the vision of the company. 

Where are they today? 

Seven Starling  has grown tremendously over the past year, they have also delivered industry leading time to care with seven days to first appointment (industry average is three-six months) and 90% statistically significant reduction in PHQ-9 score after completing the program. Over 85% of patients are in-network plans which means patients access care for just their copay. This is all a result of the incredible clinical and operational execution horsepower the team has demonstrated.

What is next? 

We are excited about Seven Starling’s impact on women’s health. The space is still a huge untapped opportunity and behavioral health impact is inseparable from a woman’s overall health outcome. Seven Starling is positioned to meet the specialized needs of women throughout every stage of their lives, empowering them to thrive and achieve their fullest potential. I’m excited to join their board to support them on this ambitious and admirable mission. 

It has been a privilege to partner with the Seven Starling team – their operational excellence and clarity of thought has made the journey to date an exhilarating one. 

However, we realize the work is not over; we still have a lot to build! All of us at Pear VC are excited to continue our partnership with them.

Earlier this week, PearX S19 alum Learn to Win (L2W) announced a $30M Series A round, led by the Westly Group and joined by Pear and Norwest Venture Partners. L2W’s software improves training & onboarding for a wide range of enterprise clients, from the Los Angeles Rams to the U.S. Air Force. They do this better than anyone else by using data analytics and AI to personalize learning effectiveness for their customers.

We first backed L2W in 2019, and now five years later, we are honored to double down our support for them. To mark the occasion, we wanted to reflect on our partnership with L2W and the amazing progress they’ve made over the last five years.

We met the founders of L2W, Sasha Seymore and Andrew Powell, in 2019 when they were students at Stanford GSB. We met as part of a business plan competition and our teams hit it off. They’d been chewing over the concept behind L2W for years, but they finally got it off the ground in 2018 while at the GSB.

We met them when they were just two co-founders and an idea with a little traction, and we decided to back them for a few major reasons:

• First, the founding team was fully dedicated to pursuing the idea: Sasha and Andrew met their freshmen year as Morehead-Cain scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and they were roommates throughout undergrad. They started discussing the concept of L2W during that time. Following graduation, they went their separate ways: Andrew to Mauritius and Sasha to play basketball in Europe. Although they were apart for three years, they continued to discuss the company and what it could be. And then completely by coincidence, they were both accepted into Stanford GSB at the same time and decided to room together once again. It felt like fate, so they were drawn to pursue L2W officially. 

• Second, they solved a problem that they were passionate about: Andrew was really interested in education and had spent three years at The African Leadership University in Mauritius designing new learning models. Sasha was a basketball player at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had spent time studying the possibilities of peace through sports.They combined their passions in education and sports to create a new method for training athletes. Their initial pitch to us was: Learn to Win is a “Rosetta Stone” of playbook learning, turning playbook and gameplan materials into an interactive learning experience and providing coaches insight and analytics into what their players understand and what they do not.
• Lastly, they knew the market was huge. While they started by focusing primarily on sports teams, they knew that there were many zero tolerance environments and industries used training tools that don’t match the demands they face. The L2W team had a vision to expand to industries like the military, aviation, and oil and gas. 

L2W pitch deck in 2019

They applied and were accepted into PearX’s Summer 2019 cohort. At the time, they knew they had a big opportunity in front of them, and they’d gained some early traction with a few clients.They wanted to use their PearX experience to really hit the gas and accelerate their company forward. Through the 14 week PearX cohort, they onboarded many new customers to their microlearning modules, and by the time Demo Day rolled around, they had 100+ clients and over $1M in sales. They also expanded beyond sports during PearX and signed a large contract with the U.S. Air Force. 

2019 PearX Demo Day pitch

PearX S19 cohort, which included companies like Windborne, Polimorphic, Learn to Win, Xilis, and Gradio.

Following Demo Day, they raised a $4M seed round in 2020 led by Norwest Venture Partners and joined by Pear and 20|20 Fund. They continued working out of Pear’s offices in Palo Alto for a period of time, so we had the chance to work side by side with the team and see their progress. Over the following few years, they grew from a team of 2 into a full-time staff of 30+. They continued to refine and evolve their product, and onboarded hundreds of enterprise clients like Chick-fil-A, the U.S. Department of Defense, and professional sports teams like the Carolina Panthers. In the last few years, they’ve expanded and refined their platform, involving even more learning science and AI to better help customers with their training. 

With this latest $30M Series A fundraise, we know they’ll be able to take it even further. Their path has been exciting to witness and we are excited to see where they take the tool next. 

Early-stage company building poses a unique set of challenges, and we’ve created what we believe to be the best accelerator out there for pre-seed founders. PearX is our exclusive, small batch, 14 week program. PearX alums have extremely high likelihood of startup success. In fact, 90% of our companies go on to raise a successful round from top tier investors and have cumulatively raised $2B in venture capital.

But don’t take our word for it – we spoke with 3 recent PearX alums about their experiences going through PearX, and what sets it apart from other programs:

Bobyard (PearX S23):

Bobyard automates the construction takeoff process with CV and NLP models to make cost estimates 10x faster while eliminating mistakes. After Demo Day, Bobyard raised a $3.5M round from Primary.

EarthXYZ (PearX S23):

EarthXYZ makes imaging hardware & analytics software to create & process the highest resolution hyperspectral data, using ML & genAI to deliver insights. They’re in the final stages of closing a sizable round; the only capital before this was their PearX check. 

Advex (PearX S23):

Advex works on synthetic data for vision, solving the biggest bottleneck for applied machine learning. After Demo Day, Advex raised $3M from Construct Capital, Emerson Collective, and Pear.

Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity. 

What did you learn from PearX? 

Bobyard: I learned what good looks like. I’m a solo founder and a first-time founder. I didn’t know how fast a team could move until I entered PearX. The structure of the cohort, working with companies that are in similar places as you, pushes you to go further. 

I also learned how important it is to deeply understand your customer and the value prop of your product. Ajay and Sean constantly pushed me to dive deeper into the customer psyche, discovering where my product could be worth a lot more.

Earth XYZ: During the accelerator, we nailed down customer discovery, understanding what our customers want from our technology and ironing out what we needed to build. After Demo Day, we got a ton of new customers — we juggled between supporting the customers while continuing to build on the technical side. 

Advex: During PearX, we went from having a potential customer to really fleshing out what our V0 was going to look like. We closed a real paying customer and since then, we’ve closed several more customers, raised the seed round, and grown our team to 5 people. 

What sets the Pear team apart? 

Bobyard: They have all bases covered. Pear knows the problems that most startups deal with, regardless of the vertical or the industry. 

Pear’s an order of magnitude smaller than the other accelerator programs out there, which means you get more than twice the attention, and you get support from a partner for each of the major categories. 

Earth XYZ: When I talk about Pear, the first thing that comes to mind is resources. I’ve heard friends who have gone through other accelerators where they receive a random firehose of generalistic knowledge. At Pear, I talked to dedicated partners 1:1 on specific strategies. 

How has Pear helped your company the most? 

Bobyard: I’d never fundraised before. Demo Day is a really special experience, but without structure and guidance towards preparing your presentation, it’s very difficult to pull off. 

The next thing is hiring. It’s pretty difficult to convince someone that’s better than you to work for you, but hiring a great team is so important to the company. I worked with Nate after the accelerator to hire the first founding engineers at Bobyard, and all of them turned out to be amazing. He helped me with the job descriptions, the interview rounds, what we should look for… it’s a lot of knowledge that accrues over many years of hiring for startups. 

Advex: As we’re now a seed stage company, we’ve really been leveraging the hiring help from Pear and it’s been a huge help. They’ve helped us understand how the job description should evolve over time, ensuring that we’re hiring the right person that we need for whatever the business needs are at the time. 

Describe Pear in 3 words:

Bobyard: 

Home— I spent all my waking hours in the Pear office during PearX. 

Support— the team believed in my vision and took a chance on me. 

Family— I work out of the Pear SF office now, and every day I see people from the Pear team. 

Advex: 

Grounding— they’ve helped us understand why our customers are reacting the way they are, given their previous experience. 

Flexible — helping us get what we need, whether it’s product or hiring. 

Friendly— they help us think about the past and the future, working on improving at all times and making good decisions moving forward. 

Any advice for early-stage founders? 

Bobyard: You should apply. When you do apply, don’t force yourself to be a founder you are not or a company you are not. Build conviction on the thing you’re building. 

Earth XYZ: If you’re a founder like me with deep tech, hard tech, or non-traditional software based companies, don’t be turned away from applying to PearX. Beyond software, Pear has a ton of expertise, and partners bring in their own network and resources. Early-stage building is company-agnostic in many ways, and the Pear team has a deep bench of expertise. 

Applications for PearX are due Wednesday, May 1. Apply today!

Intro:

PearX S19 alum Gradio, which is now part of Hugging Face, has had a momentous few years. They recently launched Version 4.0 of their app and they have quickly become a leading workflow tool in the generative AI infrastructure space. We’re so proud of their success, and wanted to take a look back at the earliest days of the company, why we were excited to partner with Gradio’s founders from day 0, and some of their biggest milestones along the way.

How we met the team:

We first met Gradio’s founding team, Abubakar “Abu” Abid, Ali Abdalla, Ali Abid, and Dawood Khan through Pear’s Fellows program. They were housemates at Stanford at the time, and they came to us with an idea to speed up the process of collecting and labeling data for use with AI and ML. Put simply, they wanted to make it really simple for ML engineers to build and share computer vision models and ultimately to make more reliable models. 

Why we invested:

After meeting the team, we were excited to invest in Gradio from day 0 for a few key reasons:

• The team: We knew this was the right team to tackle the space. Abu worked on this problems during his PhD in ML at Stanford. The founding team built deep technical products at companies like Tesla and Google. They also had an amazing advisor in Stanford Professor James Zou, who pioneered data valuation methods. 
• The big market opportunity: Gradio was founded in 2019 when every company was on the precipice of becoming a data-driven or AI company. In 2019 alone, companies were spending $32 billion on data acquisition and labeling, and that number was slated to rise 50% year over year. This easily made this a multi-billion dollar market. 
• The right product vision: We felt that Gradio could solve the biggest problems that data companies face. At that time, to build AI products, companies had to collect and manually label lots of data and then feed that data into machine learning algorithms and there was a crisis of poor data quality. It was a long and broken process that was ripe for innovation. Gradio’s product leveraged ML research to integrate with a company’s existing data pipeline to maximize the value of the data for ML. Essentially, they created the missing data valuation layer to maximize the potential of data for machine learning. 

How they evolved and what’s next:

They joined our PearX S19 cohort, and through the 14 week PearX cohort, they made huge leaps and bounds with their product. They ran four pilots with different kinds of natural language processing (speech or text) companies, ranging from legal contracts to financial records. Over the course of PearX, these smaller pilots led to landing bigger clients like Wells Fargo and TDBank. They used the learnings from this pilot to steadily expand to cover more areas of machine learning like video. 

At the end of PearX, Abu presented at our Demo Day to a room of tier one investors, and after Demo Day, Gradio successfully raised a seed round. Following the fundraise, our team continued working closely with Gradio’s team to find true product-market fit. This included exploring enterprise solutions across various verticals, which eventually led the team to pursue an Open Source approach to expedite product adoption. Gradio was open sourced, and it became the de facto tool for presenting AI / ML projects to a wide range of audiences. In the end, more than 300,000 demos were built using Gradio. 

In late 2021, they were acquired by Hugging Face. The Pear team partnered closely with Gradio’s leadership throughout the entire acquisition process. They are now a key pillar of Hugging Face, where they provide Hugging Face’s users, developers, and data scientists the tools needed to get high level results and create better models and tools. It’s a machine learning match made in heaven and together, they are building the future of ML. 

We’re excited for even more success from Gradio and will be cheering them on!

This week, PearX S19 alum, Polimorphic, announced their $5.6m seed round led by M13 with participation from Pear and Shine Capital. We’re really excited about this milestone for Polimorphic because we’ve been able to witness their incredible growth from an idea that came about in their dorm room at MIT to becoming a leading infrastructure player for state, local, and federal government agencies. They’ve demonstrated some amazing traction: 30 governments actively using their platform and they continue to add 15 new customers every month. 

To mark the occasion, we wanted to look back over the last 4+ years of working with the Polimorphic team and some of the major milestones along the way.

How we met the team

We first met Polimorphic’s co-founders, Parth and Daniel, at MIT when they applied for Pear Competition. We invited them to join our upcoming PearX batch in the Summer of 2019. 

At the time, the founders were working on a product to make sense of government data. The first version was a tool to collect information from federal, state, and local agencies like press releases, legislation and more, making it easy to digest and consume for politicians and constituents alike but especially for younger consumers. 

How they evolved

Polimorphic has evolved quite a bit since 2019. After PearX, the team raised some additional capital and went on a country wide road trip to meet face-to-face with federal, state, and local agencies to learn about their needs. In January 2020, they set off on their trip and visited Iowa, New Hampshire, Washington DC, North Carolina, and Michigan. The pandemic hit during this road trip, and they were even stranded in Michigan for a while! 

Through many months of customer discovery, they learned that their data transparency product was not, in fact, the biggest pain point for governments. Instead, they learned that federal, state, and local government agencies dealt with a tremendous amount of manual work with the number of tasks they deal with – from applications to internal approval workflows to payments processing.

Why we invested

While the product has evolved since 2019, we knew there was a big opportunity here for this team to tackle. We were very optimistic about their unique ability to build in this space and we’re really excited that they uncovered this big opportunity. Some of the reasons we were, and still are, excited about this team include:

• Market opportunity: We all interact with local, state, and federal governments for many daily tasks. We see a multi billion dollar opportunity in providing software to help federal, state, and local governments manage their day-to-day work. Governments still use a lot of pen and paper in their processes which is why many people view governments as slow moving. But interacting with our government does not need to be a slog.
• Product vision:  The team saw this big untapped opportunity to digitize and add automation to our interactions with governments. Polimorphic helps digitize applications, payments, internal approval flows and use AI to help automate the busy work for government employees.
• Founding team: We found Parth and Daniel so compelling. They were two undergraduate engineers thinking deeply about the problems our governments face. Parth’s grandfather worked in local government and he saw first hand the work that went into getting constituents their basic government services. This problem felt really personal to them. They were on a mission to solve these problems and had the grit and tenacity to focus on an otherwise unsexy space. We knew if they could land some customers, the product would be sticky and this has proven to be true.

What’s to come

Over the last four years, we’ve partnered closely with their team as they’ve refined their product roadmap. We helped them identify the biggest hurdles that governments face and encouraged them to really talk to their customers to understand those pain points inside and out. 

We also helped the Polimorphic team fine tune their pitch and raise additional capital. When looking to raise more funding, Parth presented again at our PearX W23 demo day and quickly found a lead investor for this round.

This team has made huge strides since we met them. It’s really inspiring to look back over the last few years to see how they’ve grown in a relatively short amount of time. They went from being stuck in Michigan during the pandemic with no customers to having 30 cities and counties (and growing!) using their software. They’re rapidly growing and are adding a new city to their platform every 2 days. They recently launched a GovGPT, the first gen AI tool that governments have made public to their constituents in the entire country. We’re excited for their future!

On August 3rd, PearX S20 alum Sequel, received FDA approval. Sequel’s co-founders, Greta Meyer and Amanda Calabrese, worked hard to develop their product and work through the FDA clearance process. This can be a grueling process, so it’s truly a huge milestone for Sequel to be able to launch their FDA-approved tampons. We wanted to mark the occasion by looking back on our journey working with the Sequel team.

Founders, Greta Meyer and Amanda Calabrese

We met Sequel co-founders, Greta Meyer and Amanda Calabrese, when they were still students at Stanford. They were both undergraduate engineering students, where they participated in the LaunchPad d-school course in 2018 to design and launch a product. They were both professional athletes that had lived first hand, menstruation leaks during practice or worse an athletic tournament. Mar was tasked with helping them refine their fundraising pitch and this is how our partnership with Sequel got started. 

Sequel  joined our PearX S20 cohort, right at the start of the pandemic, when they were still called Tempo. And even though it was unexpectedly a virtual cohort, it was an outstanding PearX class, with many other breakout companies like: Seven Starling, Interface Bio, Federato, Expedock, Gryps, and rePurpose Global. 

PearX check-in during Covid.

After meeting Amanda and Greta, we chose to invest in Sequel for a few key reasons:

Big market opportunity:

Greta and Amanda were both superstar athletes and had a pain point: menstruation products are still not reliable for women. While participating in the Launchpad course, they dug into this more to see if others felt the same way. They learned that most women still prefer a tampon to all of the options out there, but they unveiled a common frustration for women: they had to combine their tampons with pads or pantyliners to avoid leaks. Amanda and Greta realized that, while the tampon had been around for ages, it hadn’t seen any innovation in nearly a century. They saw a big opportunity to build a women’s health company that was focused on innovating this big, unmet need for women. 

Their product vision:

We were excited about their mission and vision: to re-engineer the tampon. For their product, the two engineers envisioned a redesign of a tampon in a spiral-shape to fit more comfortably and better absorb periods to prevent leaks. They designed and patented their design, so it’s truly proprietary. We really liked the product innovation and their vision to shake up an old industry that’s dominated by a few huge players like Tampax. 

The founders:

Greta and Amanda were stellar founders and superstar athletes too: Amanda competes for the US Lifesaving Association and Greta played Varsity Lacrosse while at Stanford. They had first hand experience with tampons failing them while being active, and we loved that they were both extremely purpose-driven. 

Amanda and Greta presenting during Demo Day

During PearX, they built out a pretty robust go-to-market strategy, assembled influencers, and started a beta program. They got a quality system up and running to prepare for FDA testing. They were able to beta test with 75+ users before PearX Demo Day. They presented to thousands of investors at Pear Demo Day and raised a seed round from MaC VC, Long Journey Ventures, and others.

Since participating in PearX, they’ve had a number of exciting wins. Greta and Amanda were included on the Forbes 30 under 30 list for manufacturing and industry. Amanda moderated a SXSW panel on content creators and stigmatized spaces. And they received positive press from Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and others. 

With FDA approval behind them, we are excited for the Sequel team to be able to focus on commercialization and getting their product out in the world. We know the best is yet to come for this company!

PearX alumni company, Via, just announced that they’ve been acquired by Justworks. To mark this occasion, we wanted to share a look back on how we met and worked with the Via team over the years. 

Mar first met sisters and Via co-founders Maite and Itziar when they were students at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. They were enrolled in the Launchpad d.school course where Mar was a guest lecturer. Through the class, they developed an idea to build a marketplace to connect top professionals to short-term project work at different companies around the world. They built strong conviction through the course and we thought they were the perfect fit for as founders of these companies. We invited them to join PearX, our early-stage bootcamp for founders, and partnered with them from then on to build Via. 

We decided to partner with Maite and Itziar for a few major reasons:

We saw a big market opportunity:

The Via co-founders discovered that there was a massive multi-billion dollar need for hyper local employer of record (EOR) and native payroll services for companies in international tech hubs. Through research, they learned that, when companies hire internationally, they typically do so via contractor agreements, but this happens without any truly scalable benefits, compliance, or payroll services. This works for companies that are hiring a small handful of employees in international markets, but it breaks down for companies that are hiring at scale with dozens or even hundreds of employees. Via saw a big opportunity to make that easier for these larger companies.  

Strong ability to execute:

After seeing the big market opportunity, the Via team focused on building a product that met that need. They built deep infrastructure in over a dozen large, international markets, allowing Via to provide the right level of service to multinational Fortune 500 customers. Companies no longer had to spend years laying down the foundation to open a new hub, they could partner directly with Via and launch their new offices in a fraction of the time. They were quickly able to attract a number of top professionals to join companies internationally. We realized the cyclicality of this business model, and at the same time, they were hearing from their corporate customers that there was a big challenge in hiring employees internationally. Starting a new hub in a different country was desirable for many reasons, but payroll, insurance, benefits, and compliance all become very complicated, which prevented many companies from starting international hubs. 

The founders were the right ones to tackle this:

The sisters and co-founders, Maite and Itziar, were the perfect duo to start and run Via. We loved the team because of their deep understanding of their customer’s pain point and their international focus. They are both GSB alums and brought deep business experience to the table: Maite has a background in investment banking at JP Morgan and Itziar was Head of Strategy for Citi Fintech. They also worked in markets like Argentina and Mexico, so they understood the pain points of hiring internationally. 

Via’s work became even more relevant in a post-pandemic world, where there has been a big rise in companies hiring internationally. Put simply, they’ve become the best choice for Fortune 500 customers. This acquisition by Justworks makes sense: together they can offer the Via service at scale. 

We are proud of their journey. After raising an initial pre-seed round after PearX, they realized that it would be hard to build a venture scale business focusing only on short term job opportunities. We huddled with them and they decided it would be best to pivot to the employer side and solve their problem which was more around building a permanent workforce internationally. Maite and Itziar navigated this pivot with rigor and optimism.

The team then scaled out their hyper-local EOR platform, scaled to millions of dollars in annual revenue, and raised a Series A in December 2022. To date, they’ve  raised from an incredible group of investors, including Industry Ventures, Switch VC, Entree Capital, Burst Capital, Pear and more. 

Given the infrastructure that they’ve built, it’s no surprise that they had inbound interest for M&A. We think they’ve found the perfect home in the Justworks team. The acquisition by Justworks provides an ideal platform to scale their joint business internationally allowing any company to become a global organization. Congrats to Maite, Itziar, and the entire Via team!