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Why we backed a Dublin-born team building the AI-native enterprise application stack — and why we believe this is one of the most important infrastructure bets in enterprise software today.

We are thrilled to announce our participation in Vcola’s $6.4M Seed round, alongside Base10 Partners, Frontline Ventures, Booom, and a number of notable angel investors. Today, we’re sharing why we invested — and what we believe Vcola is building that matters.

The problem with enterprise software today

Enterprise applications were designed for a different era. The architecture underlying most of the tools organizations rely on — from CRM to ERP to collaboration — was built for human-driven workflows: forms, dashboards, reports, approvals, etc. The assumption baked into every layer of the stack was that a person would be in the loop, clicking buttons and interpreting outputs.

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AI changes that assumption entirely.

When agents can reason, plan, and act autonomously, the application layer itself becomes a bottleneck. Legacy enterprise software wasn’t built to be orchestrated; it was built to be used. The result is a growing mismatch between what AI can do and what enterprise systems are capable of supporting.

“Most enterprise software wasn’t designed to be orchestrated — it was designed to be clicked. Vcola is building for the world where that distinction disappears.”

This is the gap Vcola is closing. The company is building AI-native enterprise applications from first principles — software designed not for human users navigating menus, but for AI agents operating at scale across complex organizational workflows.

Why this team

Vcola was founded by ex-Workday executives Annrai O’Toole, David Clarke, and Kashif Qayyum — a team with deep roots in enterprise software and a proven track record of building category-defining products.

This is a team that has seen enterprise software cycles up close — what gets adopted, what gets abandoned, and what actually moves the needle for organizations. They understand that the hardest part of building for the enterprise isn’t the technology; it’s knowing where the leverage points are inside complex organizations, and designing for them.

What struck us most in our conversations with the Vcola team wasn’t any single feature or product decision — it was the clarity of their mental model. They have a precise, well-articulated thesis about where enterprise AI is heading and a concrete plan for how to build the infrastructure layer that will sit beneath it.

Our investment thesis

The application layer is being rebuilt. Just as mobile forced a rewrite of software designed for the desktop, AI is forcing a rewrite of software designed for human-driven workflows. Companies that start from scratch with AI-native assumptions will outcompete those retrofitting intelligence onto legacy architectures.
Enterprise AI needs purpose-built rails. The LLM layer is commoditizing quickly. The durable value in enterprise AI will accrue to the companies that build the orchestration infrastructure, the context management, and the application-level workflows that make AI agents actually useful in organizational environments.
Dublin is an underrated hub for this category. Ireland has produced some of the most important enterprise software companies of the past two decades. Vcola’s founding team draws on deep relationships in the European and global enterprise market, giving them distribution advantages that purely US-based companies lack.
The window for category definition is open now. The transition from AI-assisted to AI-native enterprise workflows is early but accelerating. The companies that establish footholds in the application layer over the next 18–24 months will have significant advantages as procurement cycles consolidate.

What’s next

Vcola is moving quickly. The company has been building since late 2025 and now onboarding early adopters. The new capital will be deployed against product development, early customer acquisition, and team building as the company moves toward its first significant commercial milestones.

We are proud to partner with Base10 Partners and the broader investor syndicate in backing this team at this stage. The Vcola founders have the rare combination of technical depth, enterprise credibility, and founder urgency that we look for at the seed stage.

We believe the enterprise application stack is in the early innings of a fundamental rebuild — and we believe Vcola has the right team, the right thesis, and the right timing to lead it. We are extremely excited to partner with Annrai, David, Kashif and the Vcola team. For more on Vcola, you can check out their press coverage in Business Post.