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We are excited to share the news about our investment into Atrium’s Pre-Seed Round**, alongside AirTree Ventures.
Relationships run the world. Professionals rely on personal connections and deep insights into their networks to drive business; from a recruiter knowing the perfect candidate for a role, to an investor recalling the best adviser for a founder, relationships matter. As AI increasingly automates workflows and administrative tasks, we believe the human edge, the power of personal networks and relationships, will only become more valuable.
To date, maintaining a professional’s network has relied on manual effort (logging in a CRM, updating your contact book) or racking your mind to recall information and context about past dealings and relationships.
Tools like email inboxes and CRMs help store a lot of information, but every incoming email and CRM contact is treated with equal priority and importance and extracting insights from stored information is a constant battle. The result is inefficiency: professionals spend countless hours trying to extract insights from fragmented relationship data, miss important follow-up opportunities, and struggle to leverage their networks effectively.
Atrium is building an AI Chief of Staff for every professional, transforming how relationships are built and maintained.
Not a CRM, not an Inbox, but a Relationship Studio - where Atrium incubates your personal chief of staff to defend your attention, and surface what matters.
The platform includes:
➤ A living rolodex: Actively updating & organising your contacts
➤ Pre-meeting notes to surface what matters: Faces, kids names, and feats
➤ Brutal prioritisation of your inbox: Defending your attention
➤ Query your entire professional context: Connect the dots with ease
➤ Relational intel: So news that matters to your network comes directly to your inbox, and you don’t have to crawl 6 different news outlets.
Source: Atrium
Rather than replacing existing workflows, Atrium acts as the intelligent connective tissue between email, CRMs, and communication tools. The platform automatically captures relationship context from all communication channels, prioritises interactions based on relationship importance, surfaces actionable insights and reminders about network connections, and maintains relationship continuity over time.
The value is immense and we resonate with the problem. As a network driven VC, TEN13 has tried to build aspects of their product into our internal and external tools for some time. The ability to query our network and find the most relevant contacts out of 500+ investors is extremely powerful and a product we will use the day it launches.
Why we invested:
- Major market without a clear winner
- White collar workers spend 3+ hours a day on email plus additional time in their CRM - this is a space that needs disruption, how do professionals get their time back? Dozens of startups have died historically trying to build personal CRMs or prosumer inbox layers; the market has been waiting for a clear winner that is yet to arrive. Atrium is taking learnings from past failures; the team has done deep work with customers and ICP. We’re betting that the AI tailwinds and capability lift (LLMs, multimodal inputs, command interfaces, agentic capability) now make this space winnable for the first time.
- Long-time relationship with a founder who uniquely understands the problem, building out an A-grade team
- We’ve known Kevin Lu for many years, as a former fellow VC and classmate of TEN13 deal team member Alex Barrat. Over 6 years as an investor, Kevin felt this problem acutely and now the timing is right to execute. He brings unique founder market fit to this problem set, as well as a track record of seeing how Australia’s fastest-growing startups built and scaled. Kevin is keenly aware of the drivers that will make Atrium a success and there is no naivety about building a successful company in this space - this is a rare trait. The team has spent time interviewing over 70 customers who fit into their ICP to completely understand the pain point.
- Together, with co-founders Daniel Lum and Gerry Lu, the trio has already shipped an impressive amount of product in a short period of time. Their understanding of the problem space is evident. This is a team with natural chemistry, shared history, and the ability to scale.
- Recently joining the team as Head of Growth is Delia Dang. Delia spent 5 years at TikTok as Head of Community Growth & Partnerships as well as time at YouTube and Google.
- On the technical side, Evgeny Komarevstev, a PhD who co-founded Kinde, following a long career in Australian technology companies including Campaign Monitor.
- This is a product TEN13 needs (amongst many other relationship driven businesses)
- TEN13’s ethos is based around ‘network based investing’. Our investor base of 500+ is filled with founders, executives, and professionals across all domains each with valuable and unique insights and connections. Our ability to draw value from this network is one of our biggest strengths, but the tools we use fail to fully maximise all the value across our network. This is a problem that resonates with many other industries - consultants, investment banks, recruiters, lawyers - who are heavily reliant on keeping their relationships in check.
- We have tried to build tooling to solve such issues and create value from our network for years; tracking relationship history, querying past introductions, managing follow-ups, and trying not to let important contacts go cold. The ability to have an AI-powered connective layer above our Outlook, CRM and other tools to generate insights into our networks, execute workflows, and query is a product we can’t wait to use. Our appetite for a product like this is very much shared with other parties that we have talked to.
- Prosumer AI tooling can grow at historic speeds, Atrium benefits with a PLG approach
- We’re in the middle of a historic shift in how AI tools are adopted by professionals. Over the last few year, we have seen AI tools selling to prosumers (high end consumers / professionals) grow at incredible rates. Fyxer AI, an email response drafting tool, reached $17m in ARR in just over a year. Granola (AI note taking) reported 10% weekly user growth for the first year after launch. This is underpinned by a step change in efficiency and value delivered by AI products that leads to rapid adoption. Atrium is in that same category.
- Atrium can deliver the same value to customers and spark virality with a ‘Product Led Growth’ approach whereby usage of the Atrium product naturally helps spread the product to more users.
We are delighted to partner with Kevin, Gerry and Danny so early on their journey. This is a product we desperately need and believe in its potentially to solve a key issue for so many different industries.
Read more and join the waitlist here.
Safe Travels,
The TEN13 Team