Insider Brief
- Trove AI (formerly Mako) raised $7.1 million in seed funding led by Menlo Ventures, with continued backing from Khosla Ventures, bringing total funding to nearly $9 million to expand its team, product, and private equity deployments.
- Founded in 2023, Trove builds AI agents for private equity firms that automate deal screening, portfolio reporting, and data analysis, operating securely in private clouds with SOC 2 Type II compliance.
- With rapid adoption and growing usage among top firms like Shamrock Capital, Trove’s Associate AGI platformleverages proprietary knowledge graphs and advanced enterprise search to deliver faster, higher-quality insights for financial workflows.
PRESS RELEASE — Trove AI (formerly Mako), creator of the world’s first AI teammate for private equity, announced that it has raised $7.1 million in seed funding led by Menlo Ventures, with continued support from earlier investor Khosla Ventures. This brings its total capital raised to nearly $9 million and will accelerate product development, team expansion, and deployments at leading private equity firms.
Founded in 2023, Trove’s mission is to deliver Associate AGI. Its early team comes from Bain’s Private Equity group, Glean’s Founding Search team, Scale AI, AWS, C3 AI, and Stanford, giving Trove a rare blend of private equity and enterprise search expertise.
What sets Trove apart:
- AI Agents built for Private Equity: Trove is designed to gracefully handle end-to-end private equity workstreams, dynamically stringing together dozens of actions.
- Connected Firm Knowledge: Agents search internal apps, analyze thousands of files instantly without uploads, and learn from past examples.
- Bank‑Grade Security: The product runs entirely in a customer’s private cloud with SOC 2 Type II compliance.
“Our customers use Trove agents to run everything from complex deal screens to quarterly portfolio reporting in their style, delivering in minutes what used to take hours or wasn’t possible at all,” said Danny Goldman, co-founder and CEO of Trove, “other tools don’t have our private equity focus, tight integration with firm knowledge, and deep security measures.”
“Enterprise search in this segment is notoriously tough — standard RAG techniques don’t work for financial firm data,” said Shivaal Roy, co-founder and CTO of Trove and former manager on Glean’s Search and Assistant products. “Trove automatically constructs a knowledge graph designed for private equity, which gives our AI agents the structured foundation they need to do high-quality data retrieval and analysis in high-stakes situations.”
Today, Trove users run an average of over a dozen tasks per week in the tool, up 86% in the last three months. In addition to time savings, investors report higher quality work.
“Trove has been mission-critical to our AI strategy,” said Taylor Halsted, Head of Innovation at Shamrock Capital, “Their agents are built for our workstreams and grounded in our firm’s knowledge. Our associates turn to it over 4 times every day. It’s cutting cycles and helping distill more data into high-quality insights throughout deal pipeline and value creation work.”
“Trove has already proven its value with demanding private equity teams, and its agents are delivering faster, higher-quality outputs than ever before,” said Joff Redfern, Partner at Menlo Ventures. “With clear customer traction and a differentiated technical foundation, the team is poised to scale the product and bring this capability to the broader market. We’re thrilled to be working with Danny, Shivaal, and the team.”
About Trove AI
Trove AI offers AI agents for private equity firms. It’s designed for the grind of deal work — where hours are lost searching for data and repeating manual tasks. With cloud-prem deployment, investor‑specific knowledge graph, and team of agents that act like an always-on deal team, Trove tackles time-consuming work and answers questions instantly through a simple chat interface. Learn more at trove.ai.
About Menlo Ventures
Menlo Ventures is a leading early-stage venture capital firm investing at the forefront of AI. Our portfolio includes more than 80 public companies and over 165 exits through mergers and acquisitions. Currently managing more than $6 billion in assets, we invest at every stage across Consumer, Enterprise, and Healthcare. Our portfolio companies include Abnormal Security, Anthropic, Benchling, Carta, Chime, Harness, Pinecone, Poshmark, Pillpack, Recursion, Roku, Rover, Siri, Typeface, Uber, and Warby Parker. We strive to have a positive impact on everything we do. When we’re in, we’re ALL IN.
@MenloVentures
Featured image: Credit: Trove AI
