Storytime Capital, a new Toronto-based venture capital firm launched by experienced HR-tech founder Neil Grunberg, is looking to back startups developing solutions for the future of work amid major changes in labour-force and employment patterns. Here’s what you need to know:

The topline: Storytime closed its $17.5-million first fund last month. The firm plans to make between 18 and 25 investments at the pre-seed and seed stages, with cheques ranging from $50,000 to $1 million. While it’s primarily scouting in Canada, it’s also done deals in Australia, Israel and the U.S. It’s made six investments so far.

The backstory: Managing partner Grunberg has put in the hours in human resources software. He was most recently an executive at AlayaCare, a Montreal-headquartered scale-up he co-founded in September 2014 that sells a SaaS platform for home-care providers. Before that, he held senior roles at Vortex Connect, a Toronto startup that was acquired in 2012, and at Workbrain, the city’s early-2000s HR-tech powerhouse.

Last July, Grunberg and general partner Ryan Kimel launched Storytime to capitalize a new crop of firms in the space, as the pandemic reorganized offices and labour models. “For the first time in the history of technology and work, the workforce evolved before the technology innovated,” Grunberg said. Employers that let staff clock in remotely need new tools, but so might firms that require theirs to work in person. Meanwhile, some workers are eschewing the bosses and contracts of yore for side hustles or solopreneurship. They too may pay for technology. 

The firms Grunberg led benefited from venture investors’ involvement. Backer Inovia Capital counselled AlayaCare on acquisitions, for example. Storytime’s portfolio companies can similarly draw on his tales, and those of the limited partners (LPs) he’s assembled from his network. “What we bring is a deep understanding of what those first 1,500 days look like” for a startup, Grunberg said. “Those first chapters of the story are never easy.”

The portco perspective: Since they first met last November, Grunberg has introduced Hop In Technologies CEO Erich Ko to potential investors and major channel partners. He also connected the firm with Ultimate Kronos Group, a payroll behemoth, in whose accelerator the startup is now enrolled. 

Markham, Ont.-based Hop In’s software allows employers in sectors like manufacturing, distribution and health care to offer staff commuting options via charter buses, taxis and rideshares. Storytime partners and advisers have helped to refine Hop In’s business model, and figure out how to apply AI to its products. The fund became an investor via the firm’s $1.75-million seed round, which closes this month. “They understand the implications of future of work,” said Ko. “I don’t think many others do.” 

The investor view: Storytime’s portfolio will benefit from a “network effect,” both because of the similarities between the firms and the strength of the fund’s backers, said Jenn Bouyoukos, an LP and adviser. The longtime HR executive worked with Grunberg at Workbrain. 

Now vice-president of people and legal at Bench Accounting, Bouyoukos said she’s already been tagged in to help Storytime firms. “I do ask myself, ‘Would I buy this?’” she said. “I am a decision-maker [in] the target market for many of these companies.” That can help startups figure out their go-to-market approach.

Other LPs include AlayaCare CEO Adrian Schauer and several other executives; early Workbrain investors Sam Duboc and Bryan Kerdman; former Ceridian CMO Kristina Cleary; as well as entrepreneurs with exits like Martin Ambrose (Shoplogix) and Simon Ferragne (TrackTik). Louis-Martin Rousseau, a Polytechnique Montréal professor and scientific director at Montreal’s Ivado Labs, is another backer; he recently spent a day with some Storytime companies, Grunberg said. A “world-renowned AI scheduling and optimization brain [is not] something that most startups in their pre-seed and seed stage would get access to.”