~/portfolio / exited / lara
Lara AI
AI HR Business Partner that talks to employees over WhatsApp, Slack, Teams. Handles feedback, onboarding, FAQs, surveys.
Lara is the AI version of the HRBP every mid-market company says they need but can’t afford. It lives where employees already chat — WhatsApp, Slack, Teams — and handles onboarding, surveys, feedback collection, and the long tail of “is this question worth bothering HR with” inquiries. Acquired by Visma (Norway) in April 2025.
Why I backed it
Right channel, right buyer. Same instinct that worked at Sirena: meet people in WhatsApp, not in a portal nobody opens. Lara understood that employee experience tools fail because employees don’t go to them — so they went to where employees already were.
Founders who’d been operators. They’d built and sold inside HR teams before founding the company. They knew what HR leaders ignore vs. what they actually pay for.
Strategic exit makes sense. Visma has 4.5M users across LatAm HR tech. Lara plugs into that distribution overnight rather than burning years building a sales team. The founders chose the right buyer, not just the highest one.
The exit
Acquired by Visma in April 2025 (terms undisclosed). Clean strategic outcome: Visma needed an AI HR layer for the LatAm portfolio; Lara needed enterprise distribution. The kind of acquisition where both sides win — which is rarer than the headlines suggest.
$ founders
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