Singapore Ai startup gets PayPal mafia backing: The Librarian Raises a US$2M Seed Round

Move Over Siri & Gemini: The Librarian Brings the AI Executive Assistant-in-Your-Pocket to Real-World Professionals

SEATTLE, WA, UNITED STATES, November 13, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- For more than a decade, Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant have promised to be our intelligent sidekicks. Yet for most professionals, they remain limited to setting alarms or answering trivia.

TheLibrarian.io, a pioneering AI assistant born from seasoned tech visionaries, has succeeded where others have failed - creating the first true executive assistant in your pocket: intuitive, proactive, and seamlessly connected across the tools professionals use every day.
Seattle-and-Singapore-based, The Librarian today announced it has raised US$2 million in seed funding led by Golden Gate Ventures and joined by other angel investors including Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s CEO & Co-Founder - one of the ‘Paypal Mafia’ - and Twenty Five Ventures for strategic verticals including Real Estate and Insurance. Golden Gate Ventures is one of Asia’s most established venture capital firms and an early backer of tech giants such as Carro, Xendit, Coda, Stripe, Carousell and AngelList.

A True Executive Assistant-in-Your-Pocket

At its core, The Librarian is paradigm-shifting because it has turned the “AI assistant” concept on its head. Instead of forcing users into proprietary ecosystems or dashboard interfaces, it lives inside some of the world’s most popular and commonly used messaging apps - from WhatsApp to iMessage and SMS so users never have to install yet another app. This makes it as natural to use as texting or even sharing a voice message to a colleague.

For professionals who live on the move - real estate and insurance agents - The Librarian functions like a true executive assistant in their pocket. A property agent can fire off a quick voice note to book viewings, update calendars, and generate reminders; and an insurance agent can multiply their productivity by letting The Librarian handle new quotations, claims submissions, and follow-ups. For many executives who spend time in back-to-back meetings, the Librarian can easily save them 40 hours of assistant related tasks a month.

Unlike Siri, Alexa, Google Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot - all of which remain tied to their own ecosystems - The Librarian is truly platform-agnostic. It identifies the most appropriate tool for the task, whether Email, Shared Drives, LinkedIn, Zoom, or even the open web, and executes there - covering the integrations professionals actually rely on every day.

“We built The Librarian to feel like you’re texting a real person. All you need to do is to text ‘Hello’ to get started with The Librarian - no dashboards and no complicated set-up,” said Neil Kumar, Co-Founder and CTO, who was one of the first engineers at Yelp, taking it from inception to IPO, and later Founding CTO at unicorn HR tech platform Karat. “Siri and Alexa never moved beyond parlour tricks because they were trapped in their own ecosystems. Professionals don’t want novelty, they want results. The Librarian executes - and that’s why adoption is exploding.”

From Zero to 25,000 Users in Six Months

Claiming top spot on AI tech community platforms, including Product Hunt, The Librarian has attracted 25,000 active users across the US, Europe, and Singapore. Its retention rates are among the strongest in the AI productivity space, demonstrating that professionals are not only trying the app but also making it a daily habit.

This traction is no accident. Tiago Alves, Co-Founder and CEO, previously scaled consumer platforms from 10 million to over 100 million users. His experience taught him that friction kills adoption.

“Busy professionals don’t have time for set-up, integrations, or dashboards,” Alves explained. “That’s why The Librarian works the moment you connect your Google account. It takes instructions in the same way you’d talk to your assistant - by chat or voice - and then goes off to make it happen. That immediacy is why users from small business owners, and real estate and insurance agents tell us they can’t live without it.”

Unlike task-specific AI tools or chatbots limited to retrieval, The Librarian has layered capabilities that mirror the workflows of real executive assistants:
-Unified Search across ALL of a user’s apps, including email, Slack, Drive, Notion, and the web - to name some.
- Pre-meeting and morning briefs that proactively summarise context and surface insights - to help users get ready for the day and the line-up of back-to-back meetings ahead.
- Scheduling and reminders that handle bulk calendar entries and smart nudges.
- Cross-platform execution from posting polished updates straight to social media, to filing tickets in GitHub or updating tasks in project tools, it executes across platforms so users never have to switch apps.
- This combination of breadth, proactivity, and execution is what sets The Librarian apart from thousands of “AI assistant” pretenders.

Why Golden Gate Ventures is Betting Big

For Golden Gate Ventures, the investment is both a bet on the team and the paradigm shift they represent.

“In a sea of AI experiments, The Librarian is one of the very few launches that fundamentally changes how humans work with technology,” said Vinnie Lauria, Founding Partner at Golden Gate Ventures. “Most AI apps stop at retrieving information. The Librarian actually executes - across platforms, on mobile, in chat - exactly the way humans operate. Neil and Tiago are pedigree founders who have built at scale before, and we believe they’re on the cusp of creating a new global category.”

Golden Gate Ventures’ track record of identifying breakout companies early is well-established. Backing The Librarian signals to the international investment community that The Librarian goes beyond an AI productivity app and is a platform with the potential to reshape how professionals worldwide manage their daily work.

Redefining the Paradigm

The Librarian represents a shift away from AI as a novelty and toward AI as trusted infrastructure for daily professional life. Where Siri and Alexa struggled to integrate beyond basic commands, The Librarian has already proven it can behave like a full EA: preparing briefs, sending follow-ups, managing calendars, and bridging silos of information.

Michelle Tham
Motley Crew Consulting
+65 9638 4253
michelle.tham@motleycrewconsulting.com
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An Executive Assistant in Your Pocket

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