Why we invested in Archbee
There it is — one of our earliest investments to date and a reflection of our confidence in the exceptional developer and founder, Dragos. We’re excited to announce that we led the Pre-Seed round in Archbee. Here’s our “why”…
All tech companies need documentation tools. Archbee perfectly blends together the use case of Notion and that of public technical documentation. You might think that companies like Notion, Guru, or GitBook have already won the market over. This is far from the truth. In reality, the available solutions lack many features for devs. And those that are more technical often lack on the design front (to say the least) and are not created with UX at heart, hence they’re approached with hostility by business people. This is where Archbee steps in. It’s ultrafast, dead-simple, beautifully designed and makes developers’ collaboration (both internal and external) asynchronous, providing much needed room for deep-focused work critical to solving difficult problems.
Focus on developers
Archbee was created with the engineering teams in mind from day one. It has all the features that they might need like API references, developer guides, or architecture diagrams. Tech people, we talked to immediately noticed that Archbee has great looking code snippets (most said they were significantly better than e.g. Slab); that it allows to share docs outside the organization (which is not the case for Confluence), and making graphs works great (this usually is a pain point in tech documentation). The platform also helps to move developers from working synchronously (Zoom, Slack) to asynchronously, which allows them to spend more time in deep work mode and solve more challenging issues that demand full attention. Have a look at what customers say.
Great UX to impress your (potential) customers
One of the unexpected findings of our due diligence was that Archbee is loved by marketing and sales teams. Public documentation is critical when selling products to developers because instead of staying on the level of marketing fluff of your landing page, devs will check out the docs to determine what the tool really does and how it works. Poor experience with documentation will decrease your conversion! The variety of integrated building blocks and formatting options offered by Archbee is great so you can be sure that your documentation is both easy to manage and simply… eye-catching. What’s more, Archbee allows you to optimize documents for SEO purposes!
Product Led Growth
Archbee grew organically to over 100 customers, including companies backed by top VC funds like a16z (ChartHop) and Lightspeed VP (Epsagon). The company has over 700 weekly active users, negative churn, and double-digit month-over-month growth. All of that was achieved with 0 marketing spend due to the PLG approach. It usually starts from a single user, and then the subscription expands to the tech team. Some of the customers even pay for accounts of their customers to collaborate with them. The positive reviews on g2 and being Product of the Day on Product Hunt help keep the wheels spinning
Exceptional founder
Usually, it takes a village to build a great product. Would you believe that the first version of Archbee was built by a single person? Dragos Bulugean is the founder behind the project, and his ultimate vision is to build the best asynchronous communication tool for engineering teams. Now he has resources (both the money and the team) to make his vision happen! We strongly believe in the founder and that Archbee can be a primary tool used by developers globally. Apparently, we aren’t the only ones as Dragos got into Y Combinator a couple of days before the final closing of our investment. Kudos to him! If you also share Dragos’ vision, don’t be afraid to join him. He will need many hands on board to help developers work in a more efficient way!
Make sure to check Archbee’s website and follow them on LinkedIn to stay up to date!
Inovo Venture Partners is a first-choice VC for ambitious founders from Poland and the CEE region. We back early-stage, post-traction startups with up to €3M of initial investment, and help them build global brands while driving growth of the local startup ecosystem. We take great pride in being close to top founders who think big. We’re investors in: Booksy, Restaumatic, Sotrender, Infermedica, Spacelift, Tidio, AI Clearing, Zowie, Jutro Medical, Intiaro, Packhelp, Preply, Eyerim, Allset, SunRoof. Our second fund reached a total of €54M.
For more information visit: inovo.vc
