See the pitch deck that startup Assembly used to convince investors to bet $10 million on its approach to business software


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  • Assembly is a software app aimed at helping businesses manage their teams and projects.
  • It just raised $10 million in Series A funding from investors like Homebrew and Alumni Ventures.
  • Here’s the pitch deck it used to fundraise at an interesting time for the business apps category.

Employees have an abundance of software to help them stay connected at work. They talk to their team in one app, take meeting notes in another, and send surveys or feedback in a third. There are apps just for giving kudos for a job well done. For some, the explosion of business software has brought on an acute case of tool fatigue, when hopping across apps gets in the way of doing work.

Enter Assembly, a startup aimed at replacing a company’s software suite for managing teams and projects with an an all-in-one app. Its cloud app functions as a blank canvas where employees plug in tools they need, like a feed for company news, a meeting tracker, or a way to cash out employee rewards. And investors have bought in to the idea with a $10 million Series A round, led by Alpha Edison, a Los Angeles venture-capital firm, Assembly tells Insider exclusively.

The company hooked investors at a critical moment for enterprise software, as businesses look to cut costs in an economic slowdown. Instead of splurging on a dozen business apps, they want “one single Swiss Army knife,” said Hunter Walk, an Assembly investor. For example, an Assembly customer with over a hundred employees said it scrapped three software subscriptions in favor of using Assembly, according to a customer case study seen by Insider.

Assembly offers dozens of templates for routines like performance reviews, pulse surveys, and contractor time-tracking, and works alongside popular business apps like Slack and Google Workplace. 

The founders Jonathan Fields, Josh Purvis, Muthu Rajendran, and Vijay Kumar were working at other startups when they started putting in nights and weekends developing a tool for recognizing employee achievements and distributing rewards. Before long, testers asked for more and more adjacent applications, Purvis said, and the founders expanded into other tools for managing people. 

“One of the things we’re trying to do is help you speed up your work,” Purvis said, “and make it more delightful.”

Investors like Homebrew, Alumni Ventures, Wonder Ventures, and Acadian Ventures also participated in the new funding round, as did seasoned tech executives, Ian Siegel and David Travers, the founders of ZipRecruiter, and Ryan Hudson, a cofounder of the online coupon app Honey. The close brings Assembly’s total funding to $14 million in under three years. The valuation was undisclosed.

Business tools face a crucible moment

The shift to hybrid work made productivity and collaboration tools essential. But in an economic downturn, many business customers are looking to cut spending, and investors say apps designed for very specific use cases are likely on the chopping block in 2023.

“In the past five to ten years, startups fueled by ample supplies of investment capital rushed to address the pain points that arose from companies’ digital transformation and cloud journeys,” said Derek Zanutto, a general partner at CapitalG, which is not invested in Assembly. “Facing a more challenging budgetary environment in 2023, fewer enterprises will be willing to invest in these sprawling point solutions” and will instead favor end-to-end applications. 

The new constraints swing the advantage to software giants like Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and Cisco with their all-you-can-eat software buffet, Insider has reported. It’s much easier for business customers to trim a single tool than an all-inclusive suite.

“Our work life is going to become a battleground for products that want to own more of our working life than just the one to two things they’ve been doing for us already,” said Kyle Harrison, a general partner at Contrary Capital, which is not invested in Assembly.

Since its inception, Assembly has hired a team of more than 30 developers, marketers, and salespeople, and it plans to grow staff in 2023. It also just took the wraps off a Chrome browser extention that lets customers search for files across dozens of apps, “doubling down on time savings” as an advantage, Fields said.

Read the pitch deck Assembly used to woo clients and to land a preemptive funding offer in 2022:

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