Reframe emerges from stealth with $5M raise

Reframe, a startup dedicated to redefining the human-computer relationship, today announces it has emerged from stealth and raised $5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Primary Venture Partners, with Eniac Ventures as co-lead, with participation from Founder Collective and Operator Partners. Brad Svrluga from Primary Venture Partners is on the board.

Currently, all digital applications - including collaborative and project management tools such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Docs, Microsoft Office, JIRA, Notion, Monday.com, Asana - exist in silos, with information scattered across multiple applications. This fragmentation not only makes it hard to focus and collaborate but also leads to poor decision-making. Employees waste an average of 12 hours every week 

searching for or recreating information, with businesses losing 20-30% in revenue annually due to these inefficiencies.

To solve this, Reframe has created the Organized Work Environment (OWE); a native download for MacOS and Windows that transforms traditional desktops into dynamic, context-aware workspaces. By organizing apps, AI tools, and information into “Streams,” Reframe reduces cognitive load and enables deep focus, helping users manage their digital work environment in a way that aligns with how they naturally think and work. The OWE also enhances collaboration by allowing multiple users to interact within the same context-aware Streams, enabling seamless communication and coordination across teams.

Leading the Reframe team is Founder and CEO Jeff Szczepanski, the former COO of Stack Overflow and Sphere Knowledge (acquired by Twitter/X) and founder and CTO of Allworx Corp. Jeff steered Stack Overflow’s explosive growth, ultimately leading to a $1.8 billion purchase by Prosus. Following these successful exits, he founded Reframe, driven by the realization that incremental digitialization had led to a flawed system overloaded with excessive applications and notifications, which were creating new problems instead of addressing real human challenges.

Joining Jeff is a hand-picked team of industry veterans and former colleagues. Shir Nir, Jeff’s long time executive coach, serves as Reframe Co-Founder and Advisor on the human elements of the technology. Scott Eikenberry, who programmed together with Jeff in high school, is VP of Engineering. The team also includes four former Stack Overflow executives: Chance Heath as Head of Product, Pawel Ludwiczak as Senior Product Designer, Natalia Radcliffe-Brine as VP of Marketing, and Nada Elkady as Head of Growth. Rounding out the leadership is Ausrine Kersanskaite, who worked with Jeff at Sphere, is Head of Operations.

"Everyone in SaaS promises a solution to your productivity problems, but each time the gain is marginal at best, and usually we find we've only traded off one set of problems for another." said Jeff Szczepanski, Co-founder and CEO of Reframe. "Computers were not designed for the explosion of applications we see today. The Desktop environment is collapsing under its own weight, and even AI is being held back by fifty-year-old desktop technology. We're here to actually solve the problem, or die trying. Reframe is not another app, it’s an extension of your desktop that acts as glue between all your current tools."

“Reframe’s product represents a fundamental shift in how we interact with our computers,” said Brad Svrluga, General Partner at Primary Venture Partners. “It augments the desktop environment with a new set of tools that turn applications and content into coherent streams of work that are organized how your brain works instead of how the computer works.”

The funding further develops the proprietary OWE technology. With an internal prototype already in place, Reframe plans to launch a private Alpha in early-2025, followed by a public Beta later that year. Reframe’s business model is designed for widespread adoption, offering the core OWE platform as a free download, with an install experience common to modern web browsers.