Build
A small, senior product and engineering team that takes ideas from prototype to revenue. We ship fast, measure everything and keep the companies we build lean.
- Product & platform engineering
- AI-native architecture
- Go-to-market from day one
We build companies
and back the people
who build them.
Grokable is Rob Howard’s software studio and investment platform. We design, ship and scale software products, and invest in founders working on AI, marketing technology and developer tools.
- Ventures
- 4
- Built in-house
- 3
- Investments
- 1
- Focus
- AI · SaaS
01 Portfolio
Companies we build and back.
DS 01
DailyStory
Email, SMS and marketing automation for growing businesses.
An all-in-one customer engagement platform: campaigns, automations, segmentation and two-way texting, built for teams that need results without an enterprise price tag.
dailystory.com
Dc 02
Docent
AI agents and knowledge bases that turn documentation into answers.
Docent publishes knowledge bases and AI agents that let customers, teams and other AI tools search your documentation, answer questions from it and take action.
trydocent.ai
BM 03
Backlink Monkey
Backlinks and organic growth, without the busywork.
Tooling and content that help brands earn quality backlinks, build domain authority and grow organic search traffic.
backlinkmonkey.com
Kx 04
Kinetix
An early-stage company in the Grokable portfolio.
More details coming soon.
Next
Your company?
We partner with technical founders early: capital, product leadership and a team that has scaled SaaS before.
02 Approach
Operators first. Investors second.
We have written the code, run the support queue and closed the deals ourselves. That experience shapes every company we build and every check we write.
Invest
Early capital for founders building software that matters. We write conviction checks and stay close, without board-seat theater.
- Pre-seed & seed
- AI, SaaS, developer tools
- Founder-friendly terms
Operate
Shared infrastructure, playbooks and people across the portfolio. Billing, deliverability, security and support systems we have already built get reused instead of rebuilt.
- Shared platform & tooling
- Growth & lifecycle marketing
- Hands-on operating support
03 Customers
Some of the companies we’ve worked with.
From global platforms to fast-growing brands, our team has built and shipped software for organizations that operate at serious scale.
- Microsoft
- Xbox
- Apple
- Dell
- The Home Depot
- Mary Kay
- MySpace
- Pickleball.com
Rob Howard
Founder, Grokable
04 Founder
“The best way to understand a market is to build a product for it. The best way to back founders is to have been one.”
Rob Howard is a serial software entrepreneur. He previously founded Telligent, which was acquired by Verint, and today leads DailyStory and the Grokable portfolio. Grokable is where he builds new products and invests in the next generation of software companies.
Track record
- After Echo Ongoing
- Areena Wound down
- Telligent Acquired by Verint Exit
- Codesmith Tools Exit
Let’s talk
Building something ambitious?
Whether you are a founder raising early capital, a team looking for a partner to build with, or you just want to compare notes, we would like to hear from you.