A Cincinnati startup that is among the region’s most watched has closed an eight-figure funding round led by Ohio’s top venture capital firm.
Pieces, an Over-the-Rhine-based tech startup, raised a $13.5 million Series A in recent weeks led by Columbus-based Drive Capital with participation from Cincinnati’s Cintrifuse Capital, Miami University’s RedHawk Ventures and local high-net-worth investors.
The funds will allow the company to roll out the next phases of its product, Tsavo Knott, co-founder and CEO of Pieces, told me.
Pieces offers a productivity suite for developers, allowing users to save and share file fragments, or smaller snippets of a project.
Its newest offering will be able to shadow developers across an entire operating system – from a web browser to a messaging app like Slack, Google Chat and Teams – proactively saving those files. It plans to roll out a workstream pattern engine – a heads-up display “of anything you might need,” Knott said. He said it’s the first copilot you can “generatively and conversationally” interact with, “where it understands what you're doing across all your tools over time.”
The move signals its broader adoption beyond its current developer pool – and its eventual evolution into a bigger brand.
“The idea is you’ll no longer have to type out sentences to your copilot chat,” Knott said. “You no longer have to be very verbose. It’s saying, ‘We know you're about to visit this website, so here's the link.’ ‘We know you're about to go and try and find this file. So here's that file.’ How can we reduce the number of searching events you have to do, the number of copilot conversations you have to have and just give you what you need, before you even need it.”
Knott and Mack Myers – both 20-something Miami University graduates – co-founded Pieces in 2020. The company released its initial go-to-market product in 2021, allowing developers to save and store code, links, text, images and more with a simple copy and paste. The startup raised an initial $8 million seed round led by Drive that same year.
The latest funds will allow Pieces to roll out and scale its latest offering, while also allowing the company to bring the product to teams and enterprise customers.
Knott plans to keep the team lean. Pieces has about 20 full-time employees and, while headquartered at Union Hall in Over-the-Rhine, it has people based all over the world.
There continues to be a big focus, Knott said, on retaining users – by the end of 2024, he wants Pieces to have anywhere between 100,000 and 150,000 daily actives.
Right now, the company sits around 18,000. He expects that number to jump significantly following a growth push related to the latest release.
Retention – particularly 90-day retention – is an important metric in the venture capital world. Pieces had a 90-day retention rate of roughly 24% at the beginning of 2023. It’s now north of 65%.
“It’s about building a product that's helpful,” Knott said. “We have all these tools today that let us write code faster, and that means I can work on a lot more projects and across a lot more cross-functional teams. But the implications are not as straightforward as they might seem. You need tools that can capture that volume and velocity and organize it, and allow you to access the details of it and give it to you when you need it. Otherwise, it feels like chaos.
“When people save things to Pieces, that starts to aggregate long-term value for them, too, of their materials, of their sources, of their contacts," he added. "This is a storage type of product, like Google Drive, iCloud, iPhoto, where you put important things. It’s the same with Pieces.”
The Series A round gives the company runway through November 2025, Knott said. Pieces also recently raised a $2 million venture debt round with Silicon Valley Bank.
The goal, he added, is to start scouting for a Series B raise in early 2025. While Knott had hoped to add more investors in the Series A, he said having a local firm such as Cintrifuse Capital in the round will help the startup tap into local Fortune 100s – several big companies in the region are LPs, or limited partners, in the Cintrifuse fund, meaning they’ve committed capital to it: “Tapping into that side is really important,” Knott said. “(These companies) have developer organizations and a lot of knowledge workers building important things.”
J.B. Kropp, Cintrifuse Capital managing director, agrees. Pieces is its latest local investment, joining a portfolio that includes Soundtrace, Narratize and Cloverleaf, among others.
“Several local corporations could really benefit from leveraging the Pieces tech platform and their AI coding assistant, which can boost developer productivity,” Kropp said in a statement. “They are building a world-class team that could have a significant impact on our startup community.”
Pieces is considered one of the city’s most-watched startups. Knott was named a Cincy Inno “Five Under 25” honoree in 2021, and the startup received our publication’s Fire Award in 2022 for best tech.
