ORiON

All-in-one workforce management

May 25th, 2026

We’re heading out to Boston today, and we’ll be there for the whole Tech Week. Want to meet up while we’re in town? Reply to this email, and we’ll make it happen.

We still have a few spots at the following events:

  • Tuesday (tomorrow): Founding GPs VC Omakase - for 30 founding partners at early funds. Come join us, Mercury, and SimpleClosure for an evening with great sushi and great people.

  • Wednesday: AI Champions Dinner - join Unicorner and bolt.new with 20 heads of product, design, and engineering who are championing AI usage at top companies.

If you won’t be able to join us in Boston, be sure to check out AI Day #NYTechWeek, a day and night experience at NY Tech Week built around the people and products shaping the future.

We’re hosting three firesides with founders and executives from Bilt, Bolt.new, and Graphite (acquired by Cursor), followed by a 30-person dinner for product, design, and engineering leaders, and capped with an afterparty featuring Ian Asher.

See you there.

Ethan and Arek 🦄

ORiON is a workforce intelligence platform for CHROs, CFOs, CEOs, and VPs of People at mid-market and enterprise companies. Its main goal is to substitute the manual process of piecing together data from individual analytics tools with an all-in-one system that surfaces everything in one place. Instead of logging into separate platforms (one for HR, another for payroll, another for recruiting, CRM, or operations), leadership gets a single, centralized view of how people, costs, and revenue connect across the business. It synchronizes all data in real time and provides companies with access to information on employee retention risk, workforce gaps, revenue per employee, and more. An AI-powered recommendation layer is also available, offering an additional level of guidance.

Check it out: orionworkforce.ai

ORiON operates as a B2B SaaS company offering custom annual contracts to mid-market companies of over a hundred employees and enterprises with tens of thousands of employees. The annual contracts are quoted depending on company size, number of integrations, and systems onboarded.

  • Launched in February 2026 and secured five customers within its first month while sustaining 15-20 demos per week since

  • Considering raising a round in Q3 of 2026, but completely bootstrapped at the moment

Growing up, Cole Braun loved to innovate. He had an “invention book” as a child in which he would brainstorm new ideas and concepts. As he grew older, he would work with his middle school friend to create websites for businesses in their community. 

He was later recruited to Bryant University to play lacrosse, developing a competitiveness that sharpened his drive and innovative spark. It was there that he knew he wanted to be a founder and build a lasting legacy. He majored in finance, and almost took a job on Wall Street as a day trader until he decided to take the leap to build his own company.

Nickoy Bennett also shared a love for innovation, surrounded by a family of entrepreneurs. From a young age, he had a network of friends and family who each had their own business, trying to make something of themselves. This entrepreneurial mindset stuck with him as he moved to the U.S. from Jamaica at the age of six, inspired to start his own small business selling cards and doing whatever he could to stay busy while in school.  

Bennett went on to continue his entrepreneurial experience at CDW and GHA Technologies, two IT consulting companies, as a senior account manager and sales vice president, respectively. It was at CDW where Bennett met Steve Corndell, CEO of cloud management software company env zero and adjunct professor at Bryant University, who went on to become Braun’s mentor and introduced him to Bennett. 

At Bryant University, Braun saw his peers and teammates go through the job application process and realized that it was long, tedious, and required a solution. From there, he created ApplybyOrion, allowing users to apply to thousands of jobs in seconds. When HR teams then came to him asking how to sort through these job applications and find the best applicants, Braun realized this was a two-sided problem and pivoted to an all-in-one solution. Thus, Braun and Benett teamed up to build ORiON, a solution that grew beyond HR's hiring challenges into a unified data platform.

Mid-market companies have an average of over 250 Saas applications across different operational systems, often paying between $18,000 and $40,000 per year for a single system covering one function. These systems live in their own silo serving a specialized purpose, such as Human Resource Information Systems managing workforce data and CRMs tracking sales. While these tools generate massive amounts of data, their inability to be unified under a single system limits their usefulness. Most of the time, the modules are unable to communicate with each other. As a result, leaders face shallow interpretations of business performance.

This fragmentation is the problem ORiON was built to solve. As a centralized intelligence layer sitting across existing systems and surfacing data in one place, it provides, in real time, a unified view of how the workforce, revenue, and operations connect. In doing so, it aims to draw connections between key disjoint signals like headcount gaps, retention risks, and revenue per employee. With that, leadership can draw deeper conclusions about where the business stands and what needs to change without having to navigate multiple platforms to piece the picture together.

ORiON centralizes real-time workforce data from headcount and revenue to retention risks into a single dashboard.

As a simple example, with just individual modules, a company may see sales revenue dropped without knowing why. With ORiON, they might see several of their top sales representatives with the highest-value accounts left a few weeks prior, connecting a workforce event directly to a business outcome. 

In addition to data interpretation, ORiON also aims to shine in its ability to mold into whatever system is in place for the company, such as HRIS for employee records and workforce data, CRMs, payroll platforms, operational systems, or Applicant Tracking Systems for managing the hiring process. These integrations work across custom-built, cloud-based, or legacy systems. This means companies are not required to replace their current systems, retaining their existing infrastructure while layering a unified intelligence tool on top.

As companies continue to generate high volumes of data, the importance of a platform that can unify and surface that data only increases. Undoubtedly, the market for such a system will continue to grow, providing a foothold in which ORiON can become a Unicorn.

ICYMI: We recently announced our official investor syndicate. Check out the announcement post for more details on how to invest in our deals.

Is this week's company a future unicorn?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.