Startup of Romanian-born Larry Gadea raises USD 15 mln from US investment firm

Envoy, a startup that provides an iPad-based sign-in system for office reception desks, has raised USD 15 million from US investment firm Andreessen Horrowitz. The startup was founded by Larry Gadea, a young Canadian of Romanian origin. However, this is not its first financing, reports startupcafe.ro. In November 2014, Envoy benefited from a capital infusion of USD 1.5 million from a group of investors, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. The startup, launched just over two years ago, is now in use in over 1,000 offices worldwide, and has been used to register over 1 million visitors. The app is available in nine languages, and its customer base increases by 20% month-on-month, according to information posted on the company’s blog. Over 250 companies were using Envoy at the end of 2014, including large companies such as Yelp, Airbnb, Pandora, Box, GoPro, or Pixar. Larry Gadea’s family immigrated to Ontario, Canada, in 1993. Before creating Envoy, Gadea worked as a software engineering intern at Google and infrastructure engineer at Twitter. Ten Romanian tech startups to keep an eye on. Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com (photo source: print screen signwithenvoy.com)