Doug Safreno and Vivek Nair have been no strangers to the impact of Zoom fatigue.
As a result, the two launched Pesto in 2019 as a way to combat this exhaustion and create a more immersive experience to traditional virtual meetings.
Two years after launching and supporting over 10,000 teams, the company has announced it has received $5 million in seed funding.
“We founded Pesto because we were tired of being stuck between text chat tools and video conferencing,” said Safreno. “Text chat was frustrating because there was so much back-and-forth and it took a long time for anything to happen, and video conferencing felt too formal and involved too much work to schedule. It’s also just not fun — it’s soul-sucking and demoralizing. Pesto is a more human way of working remotely.”
This brings the company’s total investment to $6 million, and the new funding will be put towards hiring product design and engineering teams. With these new teams, the company hopes to expand its features to prepare for the workplace metaverse.
At the moment, Pesto is free for users but will introduce a paid tier this year.
Following the ongoing evolution of the workplace, Saferno believes that the global workforce is unlikely to go back to pre-pandemic ways of operating, making Pesto relevant to the future of work and an ideal alternative to popular video conferencing tools of today.
