Envoy modernizes your front desk, and it already has superstar investors and customers

Of all the things that can be disrupted, the good ol’ sign-in book – ubiquitous in office front desks – is the last one on anybody’s mind. Yet Envoy, a startup based in San Francisco with two Malaysian engineers in its employ, is doing precisely that.

The process of signing in guests can be low-tech. Often, visitors need to fill out their details in a book. The receptionist then rings up an employee to greet the person, which he or she may not recognize right away. Sometimes, companies need visitors to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) – that’s another piece of paper.

Envoy’s founder and CEO Larry Gadea saw a need to update this. “When I visited Google and Facebook, they have a good system in place that figures out who you’re there for and prints out your details on a badge. Yet when I visited friends at other companies, they didn’t have anything like that. They write down a person’s name on a piece of paper. The security process is awkward.”

After looking around, he realized there wasn’t a ready-made software-as-a-service for companies that want a similar system. So he started working on the idea on-and-off in March 2013.

Envoy has since roped in an all-star team of angels. Its first investor, Reddit CEO Yishan Wong, encouraged Gadea to pursue the idea seriously. Other backers soon joined in to the tune of almost US$1 million. The list includes Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo. Viki founder Razmig Hovaghimian also joined.

Gadea, a former programmer at Google and Twitter, has rallied a team to his cause. Representing Malaysia are engineers Teng Siong Ong and Kamal Mahyuddin. Ong is a Y Combinator alumnus while Mahyuddin was the engineering director at Viki, a Singapore-based startup that was sold for a reported US$200 million.

Is Envoy needed?

Welcome to Envoy from Envoy on Vimeo.

There’s the question of whether everything needs to be modernized. While signing on an actual book is somewhat primitive, it works. Enterprises simply won’t pay for a product they don’t need. Envoy doesn’t exactly come cheap either – you’d need to pay US$99, US$249, or US$499 a month to use it.

But so far, the startup has caught traction even before opening sign-ups on its website, and not just among tech companies – 30 percent of its customers are outside the industry. Some of its over 250 paying customers include Yelp, Airbnb, Pixar, and Yahoo.

The trick then is giving customers something they don’t know they need. Envoy lets users pre-register their guests – useful especially for events. The iPad app, where users can key in their details upon entering the office, hooks up with a printer to create visitor badges. It allows visitors to sign NDAs by swiping their fingers on a tablet, and also notifies hosts via email, SMS, Slack, or HipChat when a guest arrives (full feature list on its website).

For an engineer like Gadea, starting his own company meant learning to act with confidence on things he’s never done before. “You’ve got to accept the craziness and be prepared to learn new things. I need to pick a health insurance plan for my company. I don’t know anything about it. But my staff need it. I need to buy desks. But what kind of desks do I get?”

Fundraising is also something new for him, and he found the uncertainty “super stressful.”