Sydney-based employee communications startup Pyn has raised US$8 million in a seed funding round led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and joined by BambooHR founder Ryan Sanders, Accel Partners, and Skip Capital. This is reportedly the first time Andreesen Horowitz is investing in an Australian firm.

According to the company, the new funding will be used to hire engineers, marketers, and customer support staff, and to build an engineering base locally while taking its product to market in the US. Pyn currently has a team of 10, located in Australia and the US.

David Ulevitch, partner at Andreesen Horowitz and former founder and CEO of OpenDNS, said that the investment in Pyn follows a strategy of investing in tools that help build high performing hybrid organizations. “We’ll see more distributed tech hubs all around the world,” he predicted in a blog post announcing the investment. “All you need is a laptop, and you can be anywhere.”

Pyn was founded in 2019 by Culture Amp co-founder Jon Williams and Joris Luijke, who formerly headed HR at Atlassian and SquareSpace. The company's employee communications tool uses information from existing systems such as Workday or Salesforce platforms to determine employees' current priorities and activities, and sends them personalised messages with relevant information or suggestions for what they might currently be working on.

This is the startup's second successful seed round. Its first seed round was held in July 2020 and raised US$2.21 million from Accel Partners with the participation of Skip Capital and Atlassian president Jay Simons.