Sortd, a US-registered subscription-based productivity suite for users of Gmail and GSuite has raised funding from Cape Town-based VC, HAVAÍC,
HAVAÍC, a South African-based venture firm has invested in a number of ventures across Africa, including a recent investment into Kenyan virtual postbox startup, MPOST, and South Africa’s commercial property platform Instant Property.
In a statement from Mountain View, California, Amir Padovitz, a HAVAÍC advisor, Sortd board member, tech entrepreneur and senior manager with Google said: “Sortd provides a unique tool for businesses and professionals to accomplish involved tasks without context-switching across applications, increasing productivity and simplifying task management. This is the direction that enterprise productivity as a whole is gradually moving to and where Sortd is well positioned to succeed.”
Founded by South African entrepreneurs Rodney Kuhn, Wayne Silbermann and Bradley Greathead, Sortd gives SMEs a simple way to manage sales and customer projects right inside email with no need for multiple third-party applications.
The app has been downloaded a quarter of a million times globally and is popular among Silicon Valley’s startup and VC community and consistently ranks among the top 3 global productivity apps for Gmail.
Sortd also aims to help heavy emailers to get on top of their bulky inboxes and save time to increase their productivity. Its full suite of products is well-positioned to win over some of the existing few billion Gmail users and capture new ones as Gmail grows its business market share.
“We’ve been watching and working with the Sortd team for quite a while now to get them in the best position for their international success,” said HAVAÍC’s partner Rob Heath and Sortd board member. ” Like many successful entrepreneurs that have gone before them, we believe the Sortd team will once again show that South Africans can succeed in the global technology market place.”
Whilst the business will continue to be fully global, Sortd will continue to have most of the development work undertaken in South Africa and receive local operational support from HAVAÍC.
This is Sortd’s first round of early-stage funding and Jonathan Smith, a successful South African tech entrepreneur now based in Silicon Valley, will join Sortd as a non-executive director.
