Our Investment in Kato

We recently led an investment in Kato. We are excited to be an investor in another great company that has gone through the TechStars Boulder program. Brad will be joining the board.

Kato has a straightforward goal – solve the world’s enterprise messaging problem. In the last decade, there has been a proliferation of efforts to address real-time communications in the enterprise. The current state of play is a total mess, especially when you try to go across organizations. The default remains our trusty friend email, which ends up being a soul-crushing way to try to deal with real-time communications.

Imagine a single unified messaging system that was browser-based, mobile-based, and native on each platform. This unified messaging system allows you to create public or private rooms, and invite anyone to them – whether they are part of your organization or outside your organization. Each room has text search across the entire corpus of data in the room going back to the beginning of time. Every user in the system has a unique id, so it doesn’t matter which rooms they are in, or which organization they are in – they all appear in one list that is immediately accessible to you. Now, include integration with virtually any system that has an API, or communicates real-time data, such as Asana, Github, WordPress, Zendesk, and many others and integrate that into the messaging system. Add in file sharing, audio calls, SMS, and video conferencing – both real-time and asynchronous.

This is what Kato has set out to create. We are having a blast working with them. Come check out Kato and help us define the future of real-time communication.

Welcome Andrei, Peter, and team to the Foundry family!