European startup studio eFounders recently reached a portfolio valuation of $1 billion across 23 companies. And the company doesn’t want to stop there, as it is currently launching three new companies and products.
While software-as-a-service companies are trendy, eFounders has been exploring this space for a few years now. The company regularly comes up with ideas for new companies that improve the way we work.
In exchange for financial and human resources, eFounders keeps a significant stake in its startups. Ideally, startups raise a seed round and take off on their own after a year or two.
And here’s what eFounders has been working on.
Cycle
Cycle is a product management platform. And if you think about product management, it encompasses many things under one title, such as writing specs, planning a roadmap, assigning tasks and defining cycles or sprints.
Many startups use multiple tools for all those tasks. And sometimes, the tools they were using don’t scale well. Cycle will integrate with GitHub, Figma and Zendesk so that you can handle bugs, improvements and features more efficiently.
Finally, Cycle lets you generate product updates for your customers, create public roadmaps and collaborate with other people in your organization.
It has an Airtable vibe as you can create your own views and workflows depending on your needs. You can display data as a timeline, a to-do list, a kanban view, a normal list, etc.
Folk
Talking about Airtable, Folk is easy to describe. What if Salesforce and Airtable had a baby? It would look more or less like Folk.
Folk lets you manage your contacts more efficiently and collaborate with teammates. You can import your address book from iCloud, Gmail, Outlook, Excel and CSV files. You can then sort your contacts into groups, and add notes, reminders and tasks.
You also can create many views to go through your contacts. There’s a spreadsheet-like view, a kanban view, a calendar view and even a space view so you can create table layouts for an event.
It’s worth noting that eFounders CEO Thibaud Elziere is also going to be the CEO of Folk.
Once
Once is a new take on visual presentations. It lets you create stories using a drag-and-drop interface and generate a link to send your stories to your customers. Once supports everything you’d expect from an Instagram story, such as images, text, polls and sliders.
You also can embed tweets, YouTube videos or Google Maps addresses in your stories. The best part is that users don’t need to download an app or follow a brand on Instagram. It works in your mobile browser.
