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Making the Workplace Work: Our Investment in Envoy

October 23, 2018

On behalf of Menlo Ventures, I’m thrilled to announce our investment and partnership with Larry Gadea and the Envoy team. Most of us (you included, I hope) have been to an office and checked in with Envoy. We use it here at Menlo. Envoy is an innovative visitor management platform with a beautiful interface. For guests, it creates a positive association with the company they are visiting; they understand that their arrival is known and their contact will meet them shortly. For Envoy customers, the visitor experience is more efficient, and there is no confusion or anxiety as employees are tracked down to greet their guests. Across the board, it creates a universal and thoughtful welcoming experience. Envoy makes the workplace work better.

Without Envoy, it can be a cumbersome experience to check in to an office. Guests may find themselves standing in a lobby outside a locked office door, texting or emailing their contact and as they wait to be greeted. Traditional sign-in logs seem antiquated and out of place these days. When I see a sign-in book laid open on the front desk for visitors to sign, I always wonder what, if anything, happens to all that data and whether it’s even an accurate record of visitors. Envoy solves all of that and much more.

As investors, Envoy’s business has two powerful attributes of SaaS businesses that we love: It’s a system of record, and it’s viral. As a system of record, it captures the names and associated data of all company visitors. That underlying data on users allows everything from better planning (use and load at facilities), security (access and NDAs), marketing (follow-up with visitors), and a set of forthcoming employee services (starting with package tracking). A key insight gleaned from all this data is that Envoy users demonstrate amazing virality: when guests check in using Envoy, they love the experience and want their own company to use it, so they go back and influence that purchase. This virality drives the majority of sales, and since Envoy appeals to companies of every size and industry (from Slack to Nike to American Express to Uber), this creates a tremendous opportunity ahead as the viral effects accelerate with network density. It’s already apparent as Envoy’s customer base has multiplied without relying on outbound sales. That can only happen with a viral product, and being the clear market leader and category creator will create a deeper and deeper moat over time.

While Envoy has been humming along for years with best in class SaaS metrics, cash efficiency, and >100% y/y growth, the more significant opportunity is to build a platform for the office. Visitor registration was just the first step in Larry’s vision. You can expect to see Envoy expand its relationship and footprint in enterprises of all kinds to include all aspects of the workplace experience.

As Larry says, “The lobby was just the start. We made it through the front door; now we’re going to fix the rest of the workplace.” Larry’s attention to design detail and passion for creating better workplace experiences, combined with his ability to apply data to improve under-optimized workflows, bodes well for the future of the workplace. We’re excited to partner on this next chapter of Envoy, as Envoy reinvents the massive workplace experience category!