Veeamly

Emno Gariani's obsession with communication and information overload led her to found Veeamly in mid-2017. As a former global director at the Founder Institute and product builder, she saw firsthand how teams were drowning in notifications across fragmented tools—Slack, Jira, Zendesk, and dozens more. The core insight: what if you could bring all of these tools into one unified workspace with intelligent prioritization on top?

Veeamly launched to market in fall 2017 with a few early customer tests. Working alongside co-founder and CTO Ramzi—a veteran software engineer with decades of experience—they built a desktop app that consolidated collaboration tools and powered a prioritized feed using NLP and deep learning to detect what mattered most. The team grew to 10 people total, including Emno and Ramzi. Initial capital came from a mix of bootstrap funding, angel investors, and a seed accelerator (The Refiners), totaling about $200K. Many early team members worked for free, believing in the vision.

After the initial launch, Veeamly went quiet for product development, then soft-launched again with a small private beta. By the time of this interview, they had roughly 10 companies in closed beta testing with approximately 100 free active users. The activation metrics were impressive: users were spending around 4 hours per day in the platform, sending replies, archiving conversations, and staying engaged. Emno had tested premium pricing early ($200/user/month) but pivoted to a freemium approach, deciding to keep the tool free until Q2 to prove the core value proposition around "stickiness"—keeping users in the workspace 4-6 hours daily.

The team validated that users would consistently engage with the workspace if the prioritization engine worked well. They discovered that early assumptions about premium pricing were wrong; charging immediately drove users away. Instead, they decided to let free users experience the tool's core value, then upsell them on premium features like "similarity" (pulling similar conversations across tools into a single view). Customer success would drive upgrades. The goal was to save users time—instead of spending 2 hours sifting through messages, tickets, and pull requests, Veeamly would compress that into 60-90 minutes by surfacing the most important items first.

At the time of this interview, Veeamly was pre-revenue but extremely confident. They were actively raising a $500K seed round (via convertible note/SAFE) with existing angel investors leading the round. Their plan: use that capital to reach product-market fit by validating different use cases (Operations, Dev Ops, Product, Support) in B2B. They committed to launching paid pricing in April (early Q2) and expected to be post-revenue shortly after. The prioritization engine would continue to learn from user behavior, personalizing what each person saw based on their interaction patterns and role.