Envoy digitizes another inefficient office chore with new service for deliveries

There's lots to like about startups that are rarely in the media because they are heads down developing product and building an actual business.

Envoy is one of those.

Led by former kid prodigy Larry Gadea, who worked for Google at 19 and later moved on to Twitter, it has kept pretty quiet since it took a $15 million check in June 2015 from marquee Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz to digitize modern office management, starting with a visitor registration system that kills the traditional lobby sign-in book.

But it's been busy during that time. Today, Envoy has over 5,000 companies using its service which massively simplifies how visitors register for meetings, and are handled when they arrive.

Gadea tells TechCrunch that the service has managed over 15 million visitor arrivals during its four years of life, and now it is moving to automate another sticky point of office management: deliveries.

"As we’ve grown into all these offices and places worldwide, we’ve been looking at what is bigger and where this industry is moving," Gadea said.

"We talked to a bunch of companies, this is another of those things that people don’t think about but its a major problem inside offices," he added.

In a typical office, front desk staff are tasked with delving through a mountain of deliveries each day, figuring out who each package is for, and then contacting each person until they come and collect their item.

It's quite a convoluted process and Envoy thinks we can do it better so it has launched Envoy Deliveries.

Under its system, the front desk staffer scans a package label and -- using the magic of OCR -- Envoy figures out which employee it is for. It then emails that employee with a notice of their package's arrival, and daily reminders until they have come and picked it up.

That's smart because the notifications, which can be snoozed if you're out of the office, essentially bug you to collect your item, leaving the (likely under-resourced) front desk staff member free to carry out the rest of their job.

And, in the spirit of the simplicity of Envoy's core product, that's it.

The delivery system costs $159 per month for each collection point, that's in addition to the main visitor registration service which starts from $99 per month.

Gadea has always been sure that there is plenty of green field for Envoy and its services to expand into, and today he describes his vision as creating an 'office OS.' That is essentially a management system for housing all the offices logistics and operations needs under a single unified roof. Whether that is a general office map, registration system, meeting room bookings, door control and more.

"This is our second product we’ve built, there will be a third and a fourth, but the whole point is that we build a platform with all things linked together," he explained.

On the business side, Gadea said things are moving along nicely. Right now the company is investing its revenues back into R&D and development, he said, but it could be profitable "if we wanted."

There's no urgency on new financing too since there's still "a large chunk" of VC money left which gives Envoys "years" of runway.

"We do have a good amount [of capital] but we want to hold out for a favorable round where we have really high growth and the right team in place so we can raise at a much bigger valuation and get a substantial raise so we can hire engineers to build products," Gadea explained.