Kasey Devine worked out what was broken in his industry while applying for a mortgage. He had applied for a mortgage once before, years earlier, the slow way, filling out forms and collecting statements one account at a time. The second time, the banker sent a link. The portal connected to Plaid, pulled his financial data on its own, and finished in about ten minutes. The ease of the new mortgage application process stayed with him.

Devine had spent more than a decade selling for PEO companies, and none of them offered anything close to the new mortgage application process. A PEO, short for professional employer organization, is the outsourced HR provider a small business hires. “Mortgage is more heavily regulated than PEO,” he said. “Why wouldn’t this exist?” He looked for whoever had built it for PEO and found no one. That gap became the company.

Entravia, the startup Devine launched, has closed a $2.05 million seed round led by Matchstick Ventures, with participation from M25, Cambrian Ventures, Groove Capital, Service Provider Capital, and angel investor Daren Cotter. The round brings Entravia to $2.6 million raised, after a $550,000 pre-seed led by M25. Two rounds inside the company’s first year.

A PEO bundles the whole back office of employing people into one provider. Instead of assembling a payroll vendor, a benefits broker, a workers’ comp carrier, and an HR platform separately, a company hands the job to one provider, which becomes a joint employer of its staff. The owner still decides who to hire and fire. They just stop being the only legal employer.

Signing up a client is where PEO deals stall. To quote a business accurately, a PEO needs close to everything: payroll records, employee and dependent data, health coverage, workers’ comp history, retirement plans. Gathering all of it is like preparing for an audit, and it falls on an owner who is already busy. Many deals end right there, after the owner has decided they want the fix and before anyone can price it.

Entravia’s software gathers that information once and reuses it. The company lets PEOs run the platform under their own name. It also reaches buyers through the brokers who already refer business to PEOs. On a podcast this spring, Devine said he would rather make those brokers allies than compete with them, and give up some profit to do it. The PEO pays either way.

For years, Devine watched his industry make buying harder than it should be. Payroll, benefits, and HR outsourcing had not kept up with the ease other industries now offered. After the mortgage application process, he looked for whoever had fixed it for PEO, found no one, and decided to do it himself.

Devine came to this with a decade in the industry and no engineering background. He started in payroll and HR sales at ADP, moved to Minneapolis to run sales teams, grew a market at TriNet, and was VP of Revenue at ProCare HR, a healthcare-focused PEO, before returning to ADP to sell research and development tax credits. He had sold PEO and bought it, so he knew where the process broke down without running a single customer interview. He was also well known in the industry, writing a column for Employee Benefit News, appearing on HR and startup podcasts, and gaining more than 20,000 followers on LinkedIn.

When M25 led Entravia’s first round, managing partner Victor Gutwein cited Kasey’s “depth of experience and strong reputation in the PEO ecosystem.” The firm’s public memo said the same: people who know him call him trusted in a business that runs on trust, and his grasp of both how buyers decide and how PEOs price a deal gives Entravia something an outsider would need years to build. His team is built the same way. Four of the five people on staff came from the PEO world, three are licensed benefits brokers, two ran revenue as VPs at PEOs, and four have started companies before. Between them, they have had tens of thousands of customer conversations.

Most non-technical founders stall when they need someone to write the software. Devine built the first version himself with AI tools. “You can’t raise on an idea and a slideshow deck,” he said. “You need to raise on an idea and a proof of concept.” For under a thousand dollars, by his math, a founder can now build enough of a working product to learn whether anyone will pay for it. He put the rough version in front of industry contacts and acted on their feedback fast, hearing a complaint one day and showing them the fix the next morning. That speed convinced them.

The tools can’t finish the job. “You are the context,” he said. No tool builds a whole startup on its own. The company exists because the founder knows something no one has written down. Security, scale, and the odd cases that break software still take engineering.

The second raise came together fast. The $550,000 pre-seed was meant to last a year. Within six weeks, Devine was seeing enough demand that he wanted to make sure he could capture it, so he launched the seed round in February.

He still pitched at least 60 firms, and most passed for the same reason: the market wasn’t big enough. This caught Devine off guard, and he thought that it was a strange objection to a $414 billion industry serving 230,000 small businesses.

Devine came to see those rejections as a problem with his own pitch. Ten years inside PEO had made the market’s size and pain so obvious to him that he had stopped spelling them out. The investors were seeing it for the first time, and he had been pitching as though they had already spent a decade staring at the same numbers he had. When capable people keep reaching the same conclusion, the explanation is usually the problem.

Once Devine slowed down to teach about the market, investors started to understand. Three firms got serious about leading, and two sent term sheets.

With two term sheets to choose from, one question helped him decide. If something big happened, good or bad, would he want to call this person about it?

Two shifts made the timing work. AI made industry-specific software cheap enough that a non-technical founder could build and launch a working product, which few could afford before. And PEO is behind on technology, which leaves an opening before others catch up. Devine puts that opening at 12 to 18 months, and he had just seen why. He came back from the National Association of PEOs operations summit where every session was about AI.

The market has grown more than 15% a year, roughly three times the pace of the broader economy, and it has not sped up. There are more than 500 PEO vendors in the country, several worth billions, and small businesses have no fewer payroll and HR problems than a year ago.

Devine wants Entravia at a $3 million yearly revenue pace by the new year, and he is hiring engineers through the second half of this year. If possible, he would like to build that team in the Twin Cities. The bigger goal goes back to the mortgage. He watched an older, more regulated business take a process that used to take weeks and turn it into a ten-minute web form, and he sees no reason his own industry can’t do the same.