Pragence / About
About · est. 2024

We're building the company knowledge layer we always wished existed.

Pragence was started by a small group who'd shipped enterprise search and AI at four different companies. We knew what teams needed — and what was still missing.

FOUNDED Lagos & Brooklyn · 2024
TEAM 24 people · 9 timezones · remote-first
FUNDING Series A · $34M · led by Index Ventures
CUSTOMERS 62 across 14 countries
§01 What we believe

A short list of operating principles.

01

Citations are non-negotiable.

An answer without sources is just confident text. We earn trust by showing our work — every time, no exceptions.

02

Trust is structural.

Security and access controls aren't features bolted on. They're the foundation everything else is built on.

03

Boring infrastructure wins.

We pick proven, reliable technology over hype. Fewer moving parts means fewer outages and lower bills for our customers.

04

Show your work.

How an answer was reached should never be a mystery. We surface the reasoning, the sources, and the trade-offs.

05

Sell to operators, not slides.

Our customers buy because Pragence makes their team faster on Monday morning — not because we wrote a clever pitch deck.

§02 Trajectory

The short version.

2024 · Q1 Founded

Adaeze and Ren leave their roles at incumbent search vendors to start something different.

2024 · Q3 First customers

Three design partners ship Pragence into production. The third — a regional bank — becomes the audit-trail use case.

2025 · Q1 Seed

$8M led by Index. We hire two engineers and the first solutions hire.

2025 · Q3 Twelve connectors

We stop building features for a quarter and only build connectors. It is the right call.

2026 · Q1 Series A

$34M to scale. We open Brooklyn. We hire seven more people.

§03 The team

Twenty-four people. Mostly remote.

Adaeze Mbeki
Co-founder, CEO
Ren Takahashi
Co-founder, CTO
Marisol Vega
Head of Product
Idris Okafor
Head of Eng
Sasha Petrov
Eng — Retrieval
Lin Wei
Eng — Platform
Tomás Reyes
Eng — Connectors
Hannah Klein
Design
Yuki Mori
Solutions
Jordan Barr
Solutions
Esi Mensah
Security
+ 13 more
Across 9 timezones
§04 Backed by

Investors and advisors.

Index VenturesHedosophiaSouth Park CommonsOperators' Fund+ 18 angels
Next steps

See it work on your knowledge.

30 minutes with a solutions engineer. Bring a real question your current tools couldn't answer — we'll wire up a connector and try it live.