Why we invested in Picnic

AI made building software cheap. Deciding what to build is now the hard part.

Product teams sit in the middle of this. The signal they need to decide what to build is spread across Slack threads, support tickets, sales calls, Linear and Jira boards and the codebase itself. Someone has to pull it together by hand, and getting it wrong is expensive: Pendo found that 80% of features in the average software product are rarely or never used.

When the team interviewed over 40 product leaders during the residency, 70% named stakeholder alignment as their biggest problem. At one design partner, a single stakeholder request took two weeks of back-and-forth to reach a decision. Faster coding makes this worse. As the CEO, Murdo, puts it: "Teams are building faster than ever, but they're also building the wrong things faster than ever."

Picnic finds the work, does the work and keeps the team aligned on it

Anyone can start a Picnic around a product, project or goal and invite the people involved. Picnic connects to the tools where the work already happens (Slack, Gmail, GitHub, Notion, Linear, Jira, Google Drive, Stripe and more) and reads across all of them at once.

From that it builds Opportunities: customer and team signals grouped by product area, weighted by what those customers pay, and checked against the codebase so each one comes with an explainable feasibility score. Teams discuss them in a shared AI chat, draft specs in documents that people and Picnic edit together, and approve changes. A morning digest shows each person what everyone is working on and who is waiting on whom. At one of their design partners they reduced the time taken from an initial stakeholder request to a decision from around 300 minutes to 9.

Picnic has eight design partners, and in the past two months the team has shipped an MCP integration so Picnic can be used from inside AI tools, multiplayer AI chat and a Mac desktop app.

Why we invested: strong team with fast execution

Murdo Elwis (CEO) is a two-time exited founder. He ran Someday, a venture studio and community of more than 500 founders across London and San Francisco, and was Head of GTM at Cykel AI, which listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2024. In 2022 he founded a Web3 gaming company that grew to more than 12,000 users before it was sold.

Sophie Hyatt (COO) is a product leader and former solo founder. Most recently she was Director of Product at DHARMA, leading product strategy across its booking, marketplace and app platforms. Before that she worked in operations and business analysis at Santander and Barclays. She holds a First in Psychology from the University of Sussex and UC Berkeley.

Cosi Leone (CTO) is a serial founder who has spent a decade building B2B SaaS as a full-stack engineer in the US, at startups and at larger companies including AWS. There he built ML data pipelines for the computer vision teams behind Textract and Rekognition, ingesting AI training data at global scale.

Murdo and Soph met in the first weeks of the Antler residency in March. Cosi was in the same cohort on another team and joined them in late May. Picnic's hardest technical problem is connecting what customers ask for to what the codebase can support, and that is the part Cosi owns.

Picnic started the residency as something else. Murdo began with AI user research for founders. Within two weeks, after dozens of interviews, the team had moved to enterprise product teams, then to a context layer above Linear, then to the gap between product and engineering. By the end of April they had sent 1,200 outreach messages, held more than 50 calls and signed their first design partners.

That is the behaviour we look for: fast learning feedback loops and deployment.

The layer between product and engineering is one of the most contested in software, and Atlassian, Linear, Notion and the AI labs all want it. Picnic has to win by being multiplayer, grounded in the codebase and quick to show value.

At Antler, we back exceptional founders from day zero. We're proud to partner with Murdo, Soph and Cosi as they make teamwork a picnic.