We raised $7.1M - and we're now Trove AI

Today we're sharing two big updates: we've raised a $7.1M seed round led by Menlo Ventures with continued support from Khosla Ventures, and we're changing our name from Mako to Trove AI.

Why Trove?

When we started building, we knew we wanted to create something that felt less like software and more like a teammate – someone who knows where everything is, understands your firm's context, and can tackle the grinding work that eats up your week. A trusted partner you can rely on.

That's Trove. It's where your firm's knowledge lives, and where the work gets done.

What we're building

Our mission is bold but clear: build the world’s best AI Associate. 

We’ve started in private equity. The reality of private equity work is thousands of scattered documents, tight deadlines, and analysis that needs to be both fast and bulletproof. The insights are buried in messy data, and pulling them out is brutally manual. We're changing that.

Trove agents are purpose-built for private equity workstreams. They search across all your firm's knowledge – deal files, emails, past analyses, CRM data – without any uploads. They can run complex deal screens, pull buried metrics from your archive, and build quarterly portfolio reports in your exact style. What used to take hours now takes minutes, and work that wasn't feasible before is suddenly possible.

The foundation that makes this work is our finance-specific knowledge graph. Standard search techniques don't cut it for financial data – it's too messy, too interconnected, and too high-stakes. Our graph automatically structures your firm's information in a way that lets our agents do sophisticated retrieval and analysis when it really matters.

And because we know security isn't negotiable in this industry, Trove runs entirely in your private cloud with SOC 2 Type II compliance. We call it "cloud-prem" – you get the benefits of our platform with complete control over your data.

The traction that matters

The best validation we could ask for is usage. Our customers are turning to Trove over a dozen times per week on average – that number has grown 86% in the last three months. Teams tell us they'd be materially slower without it.

Taylor Halsted, Head of Innovation at Shamrock Capital, put it well: "Trove has been mission-critical to our AI strategy. 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."

When people use something that often, when it becomes part of their daily workflow and they'd notice if it disappeared – that's when you know you're onto something real.

Why now, why us

This funding lets us do two things: expand our team and raise the technical bar even further.

We're an early-stage team in San Francisco tackling genuinely hard problems at the frontier of LLM applications. Our backgrounds span Bain's PE group, Glean's founding Search team, Scale AI, AWS, and C3 AI – a rare combination of private equity expertise and enterprise AI experience that's core to how we're building.

Every day we're pushing on search that truly understands financial data, agents that can plan and execute multi-step workflows, and the systems that make it all fast and reliable at scale.

What's next

We're moving fast. We're hiring driven engineers who want high ownership and visible impact. We're expanding deployments with leading PE firms. And we're relentlessly focused on making Trove feel less like a tool and more like the brilliant associate you wish you had on every deal.

If you're a private equity investor curious about bringing tailored AI to your firm, or a software engineer in the Bay Area interested in joining us, reach out.

Thanks to our investors – Joff Redfern and Deedy Das at Menlo, Jon Chu and Ece Erdagoz Wyrick at Khosla – for believing in this vision. And most importantly, thanks to our customers for trusting us with their most important work.

Here's to building the world's best AI associate.

– Danny & Shivaal