Why we invested in Kinfolk
By Paul Lehair, Partner
Posted
I first spoke with Jeet Mukerji, Co-Founder and CEO of Kinfolk, in 2024. From the very first conversation, I was struck by the clarity of his vision and the urgency he brought to describing a problem that really resonated. Anyone who has worked at a large organisation knows the frustration: you need a work reference letter, you want to add a new employee to existing systems, you have a question about your parental leave policy, and suddenly you are raising an HR ticket, waiting days, and chasing someone. HR teams, for their part, are buried under a relentless flow of repetitive admin, spending up to 40% of their time answering the same questions or nudging the same processes. This is neither a good use of their time nor a good experience for employees.
The problem is that existing tools were never built for HR teams. Legacy ticketing systems like ServiceNow or Jira were designed for IT incident management and bolted onto HR as an afterthought. Basic AI chatbots can retrieve answers but cannot actually do anything. And despite years of investment in HRIS platforms, employee utilisation remains low and the operational leverage has not truly materialised. As companies scale and headcount budgets tighten, the gap between what is expected of People Ops teams and what their tools enable has become unsustainable.
This is exactly the problem Kinfolk is solving.
Kinfolk is an AI-native workforce operations platform, starting with HR and People Ops. At its core is ‘Kin’, a multi-agent platform that handles employee requests autonomously such as answering questions, drafting documents, updating HRIS records, managing employee lifecycle changes, all directly within Slack or Microsoft Teams, where employees already spend their day. No new logins, no ticketing queues. Customers report that Kinfolk autonomously resolves up to 80% of employee requests, reclaiming approximately 45 days a year for their HR teams. As one customer put it: it feels like having an extra person on the team.
What makes Kinfolk different is that it was built AI-first from day one, not as a layer retrofitted onto a ticketing architecture. Kinfolk sits as an orchestration layer on top of existing tools, integrating with them rather than replacing them, and progressively automating more as its agents learn. The roadmap is even more exciting: expanding from People Ops into IT and payroll operations, building a unified workforce graph, and ultimately becoming the AI-native operating system for the entire workforce operations stack.
Ultimately, what excites us most about Kinfolk is the founding team. Jeet Mukerji (CEO) and Kim Hellboom (CTO) are a rare combination: deeply product-driven, extremely customer-centric, and operating at a pace that belies the size of their team. Jeet and Kim have exceptional founder-market fit: they met at Beamery, the workforce transformation scaleup, where they built AI products in that space and lived the problem they are now solving.
AlbionVC is thrilled to have led Kinfolk’s $7.2m seed round, alongside PROfounders Capital, Ascension, Emerge and angel investors including Tony Jamous, Founder of OysterHR, and Saurav Chopra, Founder of 5Mins and Perkbox. We believe Jeet and Kim are building a new category in workforce operations that will define how the next generation of HR and People Ops teams work.
Bonus: Kinfolk’s video announcement.
“Ultimately, what excites us most about Kinfolk is the founding team. Jeet Mukerji (CEO) and Kim Hellboom (CTO) are a rare combination: deeply product-driven, extremely customer-centric, and operating at a pace that belies the size of their team.”
Paul Lehair, Partner AlbionVC
