Kraaft just raised €13M.
A milestone that brings me back to when we first met, at the very start of OSS Ventures. No name, no company . Pre-everything.
We shared a simple observation : while headquarters used big systems, workers on site were drowning in WhatsApp groups, mixing personal and professional lives, losing critical information. Majority of voice messages and pictures. Critical information. Meanwhile, information in those big bulky systems ? Zips. A fraction of that. Maybe because it was being filled up at 21:00 by the head of construction site, having to make the conscious choice to not see his or her kids for this day because “the system has to be filled up for the white collar folks to know what’s happening”.
This insight wasn’t revolutionary. It was precise. Not trying to reinvent a field — fixing a basic daily friction that cost hours, created liability risks. Acknowledging a puzzling reality made of unstructured chats, multiple languages, terrible grammar and big systems with faulty or lack of information.
I remember visiting a site in Toulouse with Marc. A blue collar had created 14 WhatsApp groups for different teams. Messages about critical modifications (on planes, by the way) were buried between lunch plans and rugby banter. That day, we saw a glimpse of the future (mostly in our heads, to be honest).
The very first deployment of the very first bootstrapped version of Kraaft was, believe it or not, an open source talkie walkie app deployed in a factory where people wanted to communicate, with Thomas Reygagne and team faking an AI synthesizing information.
From insight to true product market fit was no walk in the park. Getting intense useage from the blue collars was one thing. Getting it to stick from one job site to another was harder. Getting whoever was in charge to pay for this seemed impossible. “Incredible product, my teams like it, won’t pay for it”. It stings. The team created a headquarter product to stick through temporary job sites and get blue collar and white collar folks to work seamlessly. Added AI to put the right informations in the right systems for the HQ folks while the blue collars were working unbothered. Added workflows.
And then magic started happeing.
Retention, daily use — it all fell into place and the growth kept accelerating. Every single metric under the sun got checked and the team reached profitable growth in less than a year. Let me say, rule of 40 is just a benchmark when product market fit is intense.
To Marc Negre, Thomas Reygagne, Cédric Boidin — you turned those insights into a nascent infrastructure for an industry. You focused on vision and blue collars and never doubted in ups and down.
This new capital raise will help you write the new chapter of an already rich story. Here’s for blue collars and here’s for incredible founders scaling their company.
Welcome Dawn Capital Brick & Mortar Ventures, congrats Mike Chalfen Stride.VC on the round and the early conviction.