There is a particular kind of software business I have always been drawn to. Unglamorous, deeply vertical, mission critical to the people who use it every day, and served by incumbents who stopped listening to their customers a long time ago. Gorelo sits squarely in that category, and it is one of the reasons we are so pleased to be backing the team out of EVP Fund V.
Managed Service Providers, or MSPs, are the outsourced IT departments for millions of small and medium businesses. They run the help desks, patch the servers, secure the laptops and generally keep the lights on. To do that work they lean on two core systems: a Professional Services Automation (PSA) platform to manage tickets, billing and clients, and a Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) platform to watch over and fix devices from afar.
This category is dominated by a small handful of players, ConnectWise, Kaseya and Datto chief among them, most of which were founded more than two decades ago. Over the years they have grown largely by acquisition, stitching overlapping modules into bloated, expensive platforms with clunky interfaces and painful implementations. Large MSPs can paper over the cracks with customisation and dedicated staff. The small-to-mid-sized providers, the two-to-twenty person shops that make up the long tail of the industry, cannot. They are left paying for complexity they never asked for.
Built by MSPs, for MSPs
What makes Gorelo different is who built it. The product was created by two MSP operators, Mikel Wellsmore and Huzaif Abdul-Sattar, for their own businesses, well before they thought of it as a company. Mikel spent fifteen years building and running MSPs. Huzaif has been writing enterprise software for over twenty. They met online, started collaborating on a tool to solve their own daily frustrations, and only later realised that every MSP they spoke to wanted exactly the same thing.
That origin matters more than it might sound. MSPs are technical, opinionated and deeply sceptical buyers. They make purchasing decisions in community forums, on Reddit and Discord, where credibility is earned and vendor marketing counts for very little. A product that is genuinely built by insiders, and that behaves the way an operator expects it to, carries a structural advantage that is very hard to manufacture from the outside.
One platform instead of five
Gorelo is a true all-in-one. It combines PSA, RMM and native IT documentation in a single platform, with remote access built in rather than bolted on through a third party. It is designed to be self-onboarded straight out of the box, priced affordably at $99 per user per month, and AI-native in a way that actually matters: because the product holds the full context of an MSP's world (the tickets, the documents, the assets), its AI can be genuinely useful rather than a bolt-on gimmick. For a small MSP, that means replacing a patchwork of expensive point solutions with one system that simply works from day one.
Traction earned the hard way
Gorelo was bootstrapped. The founders funded the build themselves and shipped a feature-complete platform before raising a cent of outside capital. Since launch the business has grown to well over one hundred customers across five countries, almost entirely through word of mouth, with retention inside its core customer base about as strong as we ever see at this stage. When customers are this sticky, this early, and the growth is coming purely from peers recommending the product to other peers, it tells you the product is doing something real. A single enthusiastic Reddit thread did more for Gorelo than a marketing budget ever could.
Why we invested
The MSP software market is large, global and deeply fragmented, with well over 150,000 providers worldwide, the majority of them underserved by tools they openly dislike. Switching is rare in this category, which cuts both ways: it is hard to dislodge an incumbent, but once an MSP adopts Gorelo and runs their business on it, they tend to stay for good. We see a genuine opportunity for Gorelo to become the default operating system for the small-to-mid-sized MSP, and to win it the way the best vertical software companies always have, by understanding their customer better than anyone else.
Most of all, we backed Mikel, Huzaif and the team. They have built a remarkably capable product on a fraction of the resources of their competitors, they listen obsessively to their community, and they have the operator's instinct for what to build next. Jenny and I could not be more excited to partner with them for the journey ahead. That, in short, is why we invested in Gorelo.