Trova

Trova operates an app that connects people based on shared interests, focused on helping employees build relationships at work across team tenure and work location. Users build profiles that describe their life outside work in more detail than a typical Slack profile: the onboarding flow asks whether they watch sports, play video games or listen to music, then follows up on which teams, games and artists, along with hobbies, pets, college attended and city of residence. The product integrates with Spotify and IMDb, and lets users filter colleagues by shared interests, location and other attributes.

Beyond profile browsing, the platform uses AI to match employees with overlapping affinities and prompts them to start conversations, which is intended to give users a reason to share information about themselves. Management has positioned the resulting data as useful to employers seeking to spotlight diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, increase participation in employee resource groups, design events and benefits that reflect employee interests, reduce turnover, and encourage voluntary return to the office. Trova is available as a native app and as a Slack app in which profiles and matching are surfaced inside Slack.

Founding story

Founder and CEO Michael Fodera moved from upstate New York to Richmond, Virginia for a field sales role at Dell that was fully remote, with his nearest teammate more than 50 miles away. Struggling to build a social circle there — wearing Ithaca College clothing to prompt conversations with fellow alumni and leaving a sticky note on a neighbor's door that led to a lasting friendship — he concluded that forming friendships was a long and tedious process. After leaving Dell for a startup that he had expected to offer a more social work environment but did not, and which was later acquired by a large technology company, he quit to build Trova, an app connecting people by shared interests.

Business model

Trova's platform is free for individual users, and any employee can create an account without their employer adopting it. The company sells a paid enterprise subscription that gives HR teams the ability to limit and restrict user access, and at the time of reporting was building additional enterprise features requested by prospective large customers.

Revenue comes from paid enterprise subscriptions for HR teams layered on a free user-level product.

Traction

The beta platform was being tested by five companies, and the co-founders reported a pipeline of publicly traded prospects waiting for enterprise features. The company had raised $145,000 from Techstars and an angel investor after three years of bootstrapping.

Latest developments

Trova launched a Slack app extending its platform into Slack, had its beta in testing with five companies following the Techstars Boston Accelerator, and was fundraising to build an enterprise version of the platform, which could involve hiring software engineers.