Pragli (Pesto)

Co-founder, CEO

Apr 2019 - Sep 2022

TLDR: Pragli (Pesto) was a virtual office for remote teams. We have now pivoted to Gentrace.

After working remotely at Avi (who acquired our last company), Vivek Nair and I co-founded Pragli to make remote work less lonely and more efficient.

Pragli's two main concepts were:

• Avatars, to bring a digital presence to the "office" that was less fatiguing and more private than video
• Rooms, which were essentially like a Zoom conference, except you could see where people were chatting and jump in with one click

Pragli was available as a desktop app (via Electron), in the browser, and on iOS and Android via React Native. Its backend ran via Node on top of Kubernetes in GKE. Everything was written in Typescript.

Pragli used WebRTC, particularly the Janus SFU on the server side, to deliver media (audio / video) from 7 different datacenters across the world.

For realtime data, we built a generic realtime sync engine on top of GraphQL and WebSockets inspired by Firebase, Meteor, Figma, and Linear.

In 2020, we launched (covered in TechCrunch) and raised a $1M pre-seed led by Manu Kumar (K9 Ventures).

In 2021, we rebranded to Pesto (also covered in TechCrunch) and raised a $5M seed led by Jett Fein (Headline Ventures).

Pragli / Pesto was used by thousands of teams and generated significant conversation, including in the New York Times (again), TechCrunch (again), Washington Post (response), the Economist, and in Cosmopolitan's print issue, among others.

In 2022, we discontinued Pesto. We are in the process of pivoting to something new. Stay tuned!