We’re thrilled to share that Kinfolk, the AI-native workforce operations platform, has raised $7.2M in a seed round led by AlbionVC, with participation from PROfounders Capital and existing investors Ascension. Kinfolk has been part of the Emerge community since we backed its pre-seed in early 2024, when founders Jeet Mukerji and Kim Hellbom – who met scaling AI products at Beamery – set out to free HR teams from the cycle of manual admin and legacy tooling. We’re proud to be doubling down in this round.
When we backed Jeet and Kim at pre-seed, we ran Kinfolk past the HR operators in our Venture Partner community – operators and executives worth a combined $1Tn market cap who build and buy these systems for a living. Every one came back saying: this one changes how the work actually gets done.
Two years on, the proof is in. Kinfolk’s AI agents live inside Slack and Microsoft Teams, drafting documents, updating HRIS records and managing lifecycle changes end-to-end. Customers including Deliveroo, Hudl and RetailNext now route up to 80% of routine employee requests through Kinfolk autonomously, reclaiming around 45 working days a year for their people teams. ARR grew 5x in 2025.
“Every generation of HR software has been a system of record: it logs the work, routes the work, reports on the work – but people still do the work. Workforce operations, the category Jeet and Kim are naming, is the first that actually does it. You can tell a real category by what customers throw out to adopt it, and Kinfolk’s customers are throwing out ticketing systems built by the biggest names in enterprise software. New categories like this open once a decade. We’ve backed Jeet and Kim since pre-seed because we believe they’re the ones who’ll define this one.”
Mario, Emerge
The round will fund enterprise readiness, expansion beyond core HR into payroll and IT workflows, and a bigger go-to-market team, as Kinfolk strives to become the operating system for the entire employee lifecycle.
Congratulations, Jeet, Kim and the whole Kinfolk team! Ticket closed.
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