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CS Angel is proud to announce its investment in Joyn's pre-seed round, joining an esteemed group of investors, including Petra Griffith at Wedbush Ventures, Techstars, Sunflower Fund, MKT1, PVCP, and DCVF. Joyn, CS Angel's first female-founded investment company, is poised to revolutionize how cross-functional work is organized and executed in modern workplaces.
Larissa Licha, CEO and Co-Founder at Joyn (pictured left) and Kendra Wilkins, COO and Co-Founder at Joyn. (pictured right)
The Visionaries Behind Joyn
Joyn was founded by Larissa Licha and Kendra Wilkins, two remarkable entrepreneurs who have spent nearly a decade working together, leading large-scale AI/ML teams. Both started their careers in customer-facing roles before transitioning to product management, where they co-led a groundbreaking causal inference machine learning project at AdRoll.
The inspiration for Joyn emerged from the challenges Larissa and Kendra faced in their product roles, as well as Larissa's experience as Chief of Staff to product, design, and engineering teams. Acting as the liaison between Product & Engineering and CS & Sales, Larissa observed how scattered information across different tools, the overhead of status meetings, and constant Slack pings created inefficiencies in remote and hybrid work environments. Recognizing this fragmentation, Larissa and Kendra envisioned a future where every company could benefit from an AI-powered Chief of Staff, providing real-time insights into product progress translated for customer teams, reducing the need for constant meetings and updates.
"The future of work is about more than just productivity. It's about allowing any company and team to focus on work that matters"- Larissa Licha, CEO and Co-Founder at Joyn
"Company operations are complicated and our time is limited. We want to spend more time working on the business vs. in the business." Kendra Wilkins, COO and Co-Founder at Joyn.
How Joyn Works
Centralizes Information: Joyn integrates with tools like Jira, Notion, Gmail, Linear, and Slack, providing a unified, real-time source of truth on product progress without adding another tool.
Contextualizes and Automates Updates: Joyn translates product progress into personalized insights for teams like CS, Sales, and Operations, reducing the need for constant status meetings and Slack messages by automatically surfacing critical insights and reminders.
Enhances Visibility: Joyn identifies trends across departments, providing early warnings on potential issues like release delays or unexpected roadmap requests, helping teams stay proactive and avoid surprises.
Reduces Overhead: Joyn uses natural language processing, company-specific knowledge graphs, and LLMs to automate repetitive tasks, significantly cutting down on the 30 hours a week typically lost to inefficiencies.
Improves Collaboration: Joyn acts as an automated bridge between engineering and customer-facing teams, streamlining communication and ensuring all teams stay informed and aligned with minimal effort.
What Our Angels Say
Joyn's innovative approach has garnered praise from industry leaders and angel investors alike. Gemma Cipriani-Espineira, Founder at CS Angel, highlights Joyn's potential:
"Joyn addresses the major issue of disorganized information, bringing harmony to chaotic work settings. Their creative implementation of AI and automation to structure work data and enhance operations is revolutionary for Customer Success leaders, boosting productivity for all the behind-the-scenes tasks needed to improve customer retention and expansion."
Alex Gold, CS Leader at GoCardless, shares her enthusiasm:
"Investing in Joyn was an obvious choice. It addresses the major challenge of cross-functional collaboration, which is especially difficult in hybrid and global work environments. Joyn unifies people, data, and processes, enhanced by AI, to reduce friction and maximize output for businesses and their customers."
Jan Young, Founder at JanYoungCX, weighs in::
"From my first meeting with Joyn’s CEO, Larissa impressed me with her keen insights on the challenges that companies face to keep alignment. Most commonly, companies add endless costly meetings and layers of bureaucracy in hopes of fixing communication gaps and misunderstandings.
What I love about the Joyn solution is that the Founders have addressed the root cause of the problem by utilizing AI with a natural yet innovative approach. It’s the sort of solution that makes you think ‘why haven’t we always done it this way?’-- but of course we couldn’t have solved for it in this way until now, and it took the unique experiences and vision of the Joyn founders to bring it to market.”
Also supporting Larissa and Kendra is a team of esteemed advisors, including Emily Smith (Lattice), Patrick Ortell (AI/ML expert), Jeanette Jordan (former CMO and COO), Lindsay Crittendon (CS Leader, former Hippo Insurance and Headspace), Julia Metcalf (former VP of Product at GitHub), and Chase Ginther (first AI/ML hire at Snowflake). Their guidance and expertise play a crucial role in shaping Joyn's growth and impact.
Click To Watch Larissa Licha pitch Joyn at Techstars Boulder Accelerator
Early Success
Joyn's biggest value-add is its proprietary company-specific knowledge graph, which requires minimal setup and reduces overhead and meetings for its users. The traction Joyn has achieved in a short time is a testament to its potential. After opening up their closed beta a month ago, Joyn is in the process of onboarding 8 new customers with 30 added to their waitlist, and retained all 3 early adopters that helped shape the product.
Jo(yn) Us to Transform Workplace Collaboration with AI
Larissa and Kendra are eager to connect with technical, operations and CS leaders to learn from their experiences and inform their early prototype. If you're interested in transforming your workplace with Joyn or exploring angel investing opportunities with CS Angel, now is the perfect time to get involved!
Schedule Demo: www.joyn.one
Join CS Angel: bit.ly/csangelwaitlist
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