Ten notebooks later, David Pagan still wasn’t done collecting data.
He was leading a go-to-market strategy for a business unit in Latin America, but when he sat down with various regional team members, he started noticing inconsistencies. The same problems Brazil was encountering, Argentina had solved five years earlier. The same things employees in Northern Mexico experienced, people in Colombia were also dealing with.
He began traveling from town to town, country to country, talking to team members and recording information in a handful of notebooks. Years later, he would find a way to do all that work in a matter of seconds.
In 2022, Pagan co-founded Murmuratto, a startup with a workflow automation software that seamlessly collects ideas, insights and data from company employees. Stemming from the word murmuration—large flocks of birds flying together in unison—Murmuratto uses a human-led framework as well as embedded AI to ensure that people at all levels of the company have the chance to be heard.
“Part of the driving force behind Murmuratto is that absolutely anybody in any department and in any rank within an organization has the opportunity to make that business better,” Pagan said.
Pagan partnered with seasoned business consultant and eventual Co-Founder Yolanda Lassalle, who had spent years building her own consulting firm where she worked with over 60 companies in 10 countries. She took what she learned from consulting and combined it with Pagan’s expertise in design and business; after building a team of four, they launched an MVP in the summer of 2022.
The startup employs a SaaS business model. Pricing is based on employee headcount, and companies renew their subscriptions annually. Murmuratto has already worked with 10 companies, hailing from the East Coast, West Coast and Puerto Rico.
Growing Murmuratto
To date, the Murmuratto team has had the opportunity to participate in several accelerators—including the Rising Entrepreneurs Program (funded by the Bravo Family Foundation), a Stanford University-based accelerator this past summer, and Endeavor’s RAISE program. Now, the startup is part of CED’s eighth GRO Incubator cohort (GrepBeat has previously written about fellow cohort members Brainery Labs and Nearby Nearby). Through this experience, the founders are working on developing native AI functionality and readying a full version of their software for a launch in early 2025.
One of the biggest focuses is on developing Murmuratto as a decentralized operating system, Pagan said.
“By having all this data decentralized, we’re providing leaders with visibility and accountability on all the activities that are done at the company level, and we’re also limiting biases and reducing bottlenecks,” Pagan said. “So the way the architecture and the system was designed, you might be the CEO, director or just that first day employee: You’ve got a democratized process that gives you the same opportunity to contribute.”
Lassalle said she has witnessed this design changing lives. In the earlier days of the MVP, she was visiting manufacturing facilities and training workers on how to use Murmuratto. At one site, there was an operator who made an announcement to the rest of the workers—and Lassalle—about how Murmuratto had given him a voice.
“He was not aware that I was working for Mumuratto,” Lassalle said. “And he stood up in front of everybody, and he said, ‘Before, I was telling my supervisor to do this, this and this. And now I know that what I contribute is not lost anymore, because I have entered it in Murmuratto, and somehow it will be moved forward and I can remove all the headaches that I have at the workplace.’”
Stories like this are what inspire Pagan and Lassalle to keep building their software. They aim to improve their software with the same innovative mindset that they enable their clients to have, even inputting their own company data into the system.
QUICK BITS
Startup: Murmuratto
Co-Founders: David Pagan and Yolanda Lassalle
Founded: 2021
Location: Raleigh
Website: murmuratto.com
Funding: Bootstrapped
For companies with as few as 10 people to those with as many as 100 or more, Pagan said that using Murmuratto is more effective than seeking an outside consultant.
“Inevitably, the leaders that work with those consultants move to new roles and new organizations,” Pagan said. “So Murmuratto kind of steps in: How do we make this sustainable, despite that leadership team, or despite that consulting team? Because it’s a software that stays. It becomes better every month, but it stays within the organization and enables that continuity.”
And each small victory, from a consolidated business strategy in Latin America to a relieved operator at a manufacturing site, only reinforces the team’s commitment to uplift all members of a company, Lassalle said.
“Those stories are so inspiring, they keep us moving forward, keep us striving to transform the way people provide their insights within the organizations,” Lassalle said.
Those who are interested in Murmuratto’s software are encouraged to visit them on LinkedIn or check out their website.
