Our team at DFJ Gotham has been pretty busy making new investments. We followed our investment in Medialets with a number of new deals. The one that was most recently announced is Solvate – a company that provides a platform to enable businesspeople to delegate busywork to skilled administrative professionals on-demand.

The company was founded over a year ago by Mike Paolucci, Julie Ruvolo and Rick Lamb. After DFJ Gotham made a seed investment in the company in 2008, Mike became “customer number one at Solvate.” He related his experience with the service: “I started with just two assistants who supported my other business operations while I was crossing the Atlantic and Mediterranean over 80 days on a small sailboat with a 56k sat phone. No one knew I was even out of the office and I was sure we were on to something that every business operator could use." Today the service makes it easy for nearly anybody (professional and individual alike) to offload the development of business collateral, bookkeeping, expense reports, research, travel planning, data clean-up and a host of other administrative services.

After the team baked out their plan and built a prototype, we led the company’s Series A financing round. We syndicated the investment with RRE, another great NY-based venture firm. We’re excited to work with the Solvate team and RRE to help build this company. We believe that there are millions of businesspeople who have more administrative work than they can handle themselves but for whom a full-time assistant is impractical for one reason or another.

I’m sure that there will be more news to come. In the meantime, before you embark on your next journey through the piles of busywork on your desk, or hire someone to do so, try Solvate.