Legend has it that in the early days of DoorDash, the whole delivery network ran on one guy named Steve. An order would come in, and Steve would find the closest driver and text them to go grab it. No algorithms, no dispatch system. Just Steve. He was great at it, until the company grew and there was no way to hire enough Steves to keep up. So Rohan Chopra, an early DoorDash employee, built the software that took the brokering off Steve’s plate. DoorDash didn’t replace Steve. They freed him up to solve other big problems to help the company grow.
What stuck with Rohan afterward was how often he saw the same setup everywhere else: a smart person in accounting or ops or account management holding a critical process together by hand because the tools never caught up. Your best people spend two or three hours a day clicking buttons, pulling reports, reconciling invoices, trafficking the same campaign for the hundredth time. It keeps the business running, but it’s rote, repetitive work and a poor use of their time.
AI was supposed to fix this. But most enterprise AI tools serve as contextless point solutions that companies have to adapt themselves to use, rather than the AI adapting itself to the company.
Steve got lucky. He had Rohan there to build him out of his manual matchmaking job. Most companies don’t have a Rohan sitting around to automate their Steves, and that’s exactly why Rohan started Convey. Convey lets non-technical teams build and run digital teammates: AI workers that take whole categories of operational work off your plate, with no engineering required. You onboard Convey the way you’d onboard a new hire. Share your screen, walk through a process, answer a few questions. After that Convey’s agents own the outcome, running inside your systems and asking the right person for help when they get stuck. This allows human employees to become 100x operators – someone who hands off the grunt work and spends their time on the things only they can do.
What makes Convey’s agents work in production is how they are provisioned and constructed. Most agents run a fresh prompt loop every time and wing it when something unexpected shows up. But you don’t run a business-critical process on a vibe. Convey compiles what it learns into real, versioned, testable programs, so it does the same thing reliably across hundreds of thousands of runs and flags a human when something is genuinely off. Each teammate has its own identity and permissions and lives inside your security setup instead of working around it.
The results they are generating are staggering. Convey teammates have already done over 1.1 million hours of real work, not demos or pilots, inside massive companies like NBCUniversal, TelevisaUnivision, Unity, Samsara, ChargePoint, and Faire. One large streaming service handed off reporting and ad ops workflows and got back 450+ hours a week. Savoya used Convey to lift EBITDA 40% year over year and is on track to save 10,000 hours this year.
Special products come from special groups of people – and the people behind Convey are as good as it gets. Rohan, Will, and Diego have been best friends since Stanford. Will and Diego sold their last company to p44 around the same time as Rohan was leaving DoorDash, and the timing finally aligned to start a company together. Anyone who has worked with one of Convey’s three founders will tell you to not miss the opportunity to join their team. That same energy is what made us so excited to invest.
We’re thrilled to be leading Convey’s $38M Series A. If your company is buried in repetitive work - reach out to the team at Convey. And if you want to help build the agentic employees reimagining how work is done at the enterprise, they’re hiring!
This newsletter is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. Furthermore, this content is not investment advice, nor is it intended for use by any investors or prospective investors in any a16z funds. This newsletter may link to other websites or contain other information obtained from third-party sources - a16z has not independently verified nor makes any representations about the current or enduring accuracy of such information. If this content includes third-party advertisements, a16z has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content or related companies contained therein. Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z; visit https://a16z.com/investment-list/ for a full list of investments. Other important information can be found at a16z.com/disclosures. You’re receiving this newsletter since you opted in earlier; if you would like to opt out of future newsletters you may unsubscribe immediately.