Our Thesis: AI-Native Services for Under-Innovated Industries

At VentureFriends, we are drawn to AI-enabled and AI-native services that can reinvent industries which have long been overlooked and under-innovated. These are often service-heavy markets that traditional SaaS struggled to penetrate: fragmented, local, and operationally complex, yet foundational to how real businesses run. AI fundamentally changes what is possible in these sectors – improving quality, lowering costs, and enabling entirely new ways to compete and scale.

Payroll and HR for high-turnover, deskless industries is a clear example. It is a mission-critical service that has barely evolved. Across Spain, thousands of businesses still depend on small, manual agencies operating through emails, phone calls, and limited office hours. The work is largely repetitive and rules-based, yet the experience remains slow, expensive, and frustrating. This gap between importance and quality is exactly where we believe AI-driven services can have the greatest impact.

AI-Native at the Core of the Service

Valeria tackles this problem at the root. By embedding AI directly into the service, rather than layering it onto a traditional SaaS product, Valeria delivers payroll and HR as a modern, always-on service. Onboarding and payroll run 24/7, at meaningfully lower cost, with faster execution and fewer errors. Just as importantly, the product fits naturally into how customers already operate: everything happens through WhatsApp, removing dashboards, training, and adoption friction altogether. This is what an AI-native service looks like when it is built for real users, not software buyers.

A Market Ready for a Category Leader – and the perfect Team to Lead It

The opportunity is particularly compelling in Spain. As an SME-driven economy, administrative and HR services form the backbone of daily operations, yet the market remains highly fragmented, with no national leader. Even the largest providers hold only a small share. We believe this creates a rare opportunity to build a category-defining company – not through aggressive sales tactics, but by offering a structurally better service that customers naturally adopt and stick with.

What ultimately cemented our conviction was the team. Founders Pau Laporte, Carlos Saiz, and Sergio Morales Bonet have lived this problem firsthand, having worked closely within high-turnover industries themselves. They bring a rare combination of empathy for customers and relentless focus on execution. From our earliest interactions, it was clear they move quickly, build pragmatically, and stay obsessively close to the business. That bias toward action has already translated into real traction and consistent progress.

Why We’re Excited

Valeria represents the kind of company we love to back: a team with deep insight into a broken market, using AI to deliver a genuinely better service, and executing with discipline and urgency. We believe they have a clear path to becoming a category leader, and we are excited to support them as they modernize payroll and HR for millions of deskless workers.

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