AkiFloat

Nuno Martonello had spent years in product and marketing, from building smartwatches to scaling a marketing agency in Italy. When he joined YC in 2019, he was working on a command bar tool (similar to Alfred or Spotlight) that let users control web apps through keyboard shortcuts. The product gained traction and made it to demo day, but something was wrong beneath the surface: retention was terrible.

Instead of pushing forward, Nuno and his co-founder made a bold decision. They stopped building entirely and spent two full months doing nothing but customer interviews. What they discovered was revealing: the command bar wasn't solving a major pain point. But in those conversations, a new opportunity emerged—the modern workplace was drowning in tools. Asana, Gmail, Slack, Outlook—everyone was juggling tasks scattered across five different platforms. No one had built a single inbox for all of it.

AkiFloat was born: a productivity app that consolidates all your to-dos from multiple platforms into one fast interface, with a heavy emphasis on keyboard shortcuts and speed. Nuno's philosophy was clear: don't focus on fancy visualizations like other tools. Focus on making people faster at capturing, processing, and organizing information. In August 2021—nearly two years after demo day—they launched. The MVP was stripped down: Mac desktop only, no web version, no mobile. But it worked.

They offered everyone a two-month free trial (later shortened to two weeks). Of users who genuinely tried the product—defined as creating or completing at least one task—15% converted to paying customers at an average of $13.50/month, with 40% choosing annual plans upfront. That 15% conversion rate from active users validated they were onto something real.

The Product Hunt launch (where they hit #3 product of the week) brought thousands of downloads, but many weren't the right fit. They had built an email list of 6,000 over time, leveraged the Reddit productivity community, and engaged extensively with founders and communities in the weeks leading up to launch. Of the ~3,000 website hits from Product Hunt, about 30% signed up (roughly 1,000 signups), but only about 100 paid customers emerged from that batch—because Product Hunt attracted casual tool-hoppers, not power users who actually needed task consolidation.

By the time of this interview, they had 200 paying customers generating approximately $2,500/month in MRR (or ~$30,000 ARR). Word-of-mouth was quietly becoming their best channel.

With a team of six (two engineers, four on product/design/marketing/interviews), they're raising $1.5M at a $10M post-money valuation. They already raised $1.5k from angels at that valuation and have investor interest. The plan: hire to build team features, increase virality, and scale to profitability. Nuno owns ~91% of the company (after giving 7% to YC), and plans to set up an employee equity pool as soon as the seed round closes. They have enough runway from prior investments to survive almost two years, but this raise will let them accelerate toward the vision of a truly unified task inbox for the distributed workplace.