AI-for-management startup raises $2.4 million to build and scale (and hire)

Humans are bad at a lot of things. We’re good at plenty, also, but sometimes it helps to have some tips from our data-infinite robot friends.

That’s (more or less) the premise of Butterfly.ai, a Greenpoint-based app founded by three European ex-pats who want to help companies save money by having people not quit in a rage quite so often. The company announced a $2.4 million raise Monday, led by venture fund Daphni.

“The additional investment will be used to support growing client demand—both on the product side as well as the customer success and support side,” CEO and cofounder David Mendlewicz wrote in an email. “We’ll be making some key hires over the next several months and evolving our product to further our aim of bringing powerful, custom leadership training to every manager.”

We covered the startup this spring, where its cofounders explained how they came to the idea.

“The three of us in different companies, we faced the reality of being a manager and how hard it is and how bad we’re served by the company and the educational system,” explained Mendlewicz at the time, speaking about his two cofounders, Marcus Perezi-Tormos and Simon Rakosi. “Marcus faced that when his company got acquired,” Mendlewicz continued. “Their cultures clashed and he was not trained to face that. Simon had the same experience working at Coke, getting lots of responsibility and no support. My own experience, my last enterprise crashed, I think totally due to mismanagement.”