Hi, it’s Alex from 20VC. I’m investing in seed & series A European vertical solutions (vSol) which are industry specific solutions aiming to become industry OS and combining dynamics from SaaS, marketplaces and fintechs. Overlooked is a weekly newsletter about venture capital and vSol. Today, I’m thrilled to share our latest investment at 20VC in Delos.
Seed investing is straightforward: (i) back an amazing team (ii) pursuing a directionally correct idea, and (iii) with some early signs of commercial traction.
Today, I’m happy to share that 20VC is leading a €2.5m seed round in Delos with the participation of amazing angels including Mark Goldberger (Ramp), Éléonore Crespo & Romain Niccoli (Pigment), Florian Douetteau (Dataiku), Thibaud Elzière (Hexa) and Antoine Freysz (Kerala).
Delos is building the next AI-native Microsoft Office suite bundling 7 different Gen. AI productivity apps (think of equivalents of Perplexity, DeepResearch, Fireflies, Grammarly, DeepL, etc.) into a unified platform that is secured, collaborative and easy to use.
You should try the product here.
If you want to join the team, send me an email at alex@20vc.com. They’re hiring talented engineers and top sales people with enterprise experience.
i - An amazing team
What I love about the team? Delos has bootstrapped its team to 20 employees. All of them are under 30 years old. There is a super high talent density and they created a unique culture which is all about hard work, winning and building the next big thing in AI. More specifically,
Thibaut and Pierre cofounded Delos as brothers. Coming from a military family, they grew up with complementary strengths - Pierre as the tech genius and Thibaut as the company’s first salesman - while sharing a strong alignment in values and ambition.
They later brought on three additional co-founders to bring additional skills: Max, adding tech expertise, Pierre, contributing forward engineering & operating skills and Julien, bringing sales experience to the team.
Insane engineering talent density with the tech the team coming from the best engineering schools in France. Max (Delos’ CTO) is coming from ENS and 1/3 of the team is coming from Polytechnique.
High product velocity. In the age of AI, product velocity is your biggest execution moat and Delos has delivered on this front building a full productivity workspace with a super lean team and doing hackathons every Thursday night to brainstorm and ship new features.
Commercial aggressiveness and customer obsession. This team does not take no for an answer and managed to work with the best French companies without any pre-existing network nor enterprise sales experience. Moreover, from our customer references showed that customers love working with Delos’ team because they have a strong expertise in Gen. AI, they do the heavy lifting of training employees on Delos and they are quick to integrate feedback to the platform.
ii - An idea that is directionally right
Pierre and Thibaut cofounded Delos in Jan. 2023 on the insight that Gen. AI would be a transformative technology, and that traditional companies risk being left behind if they fail to adopt it at scale, as companies like Klarna and Shopify have. To bridge this gap, Delos started as a consulting firm doing ad hoc project to help traditional businesses integrate Gen. AI into their operations.
One year into the journey, it became clear that traditional companies were stuck: they did not want to work with OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot was not delivering meaningful results and internal chatbots were seeing little to no adoption.
Over six months, they built a Gen. AI native productivity suite that seamlessly integrates seven different applications into a secure and easy to use environment. Instead of paying €10-20 per user per month for each individual tool, companies could access the entire Delos platform for just €20 per user per month.
Delos offers the following apps:
Assistant: a versatile, fully secure AI assistant for interacting with the best models on the market,
Docs: the first autonomous drive, that enables interaction with one or more documents, allowing for precise data extraction and the generation of summaries,
Scribe: a personalized writing assistant for editing, rephrasing, and creating text with AI,
Recap: Automatic reports of meetings through various types of recordings (live recordings, audio files, etc.),
Explore: an AI-enhanced search engine,
Trad: an instant translation tool that provides contextually accurate translations while staying true to industry terminology and the original format (PDF, PPT, Word, etc.),
Actu: a tool for generating newsletters and personalized monitoring.
While these apps may not be groundbreaking for heavy Gen. AI users, they form the foundation of a platform that will be able to bring innovative features to the market including the ones that Delos announced yesterday during its product keynote like voice control, structured memory and document management.
We think Delos is directionally right for two main reasons:
Tech history has always followed cycles of bundling and unbundling. So far, Gen. AI has mostly driven the unbundling of productivity tasks across a range of specialised tools. That does not make sense. I believe that there will be a broader shift towards bundling, with modern productivity workspace emerging at both the individual and company levels. For companies in particular, there is a growing need for centralized, secure environments that enable collaboration and support more complex, cross-application workflows.
There is a dire need for a “Gen. AI platform built for the rest of us”. While several startups are building cutting-edge AI agents for enterprises, many of these solutions have only found product–market fit within the tech-savvy segment. The reality is that most companies are still early in their generative AI adoption journey. What they’re looking for today is a horizontal, easy-to-use platform that can be adopted company-wide. In the long-term, our bet is that if you crack usage within these companies, you’ll earn a unique right to win in the agentic era.
iii - Initial commercial traction
Delos began with professional services, allowing the team to bootstrap the company while identifying a scalable product opportunity. In September 2024, they launched their platform and have since scaled to 10,000 users and 200 customers - including blue-chip companies like Casino, Shiseido and TotalEnergies. With this funding round, Delos plans to expand its team across both commercial and R&D functions, and will begin its commercial rollout in North America.
Thanks to Julia for the feedback! 🦒 Thanks for reading! See you next week for another issue! 👋
congrats!