Left: Aragorn AI Co-Founder and CEO Eric Adjei; Right: Co-Founder and Head of product Gladys Adjei [Photos: LinkedIn]

Plano-based Aragorn AI has raised a $4.3 million seed round led by LiveOak Ventures, with participation from Dallas Venture Capital. This round brings Aragorn’s total funding to $5.5 million and will accelerate product development and go-to-market growth, Aragorn said.

Aragorn—founded in 2022 by siblings Ed Adjei and Gladys Adjei, the company’s CEO and head of product, respectively—is building what it calls the People Ops Operating System, which unifies HR data, analytics, and agentic AI assistants.

“We’re not building yet another Workday plugin, a prettier consultant UI, or slapping a chatbot on top of an archaic system,” CEO Ed Adjei said in a statement. “We’re rethinking the entire HR stack by starting with how HR and People Ops teams actually work—messy data, evolving orgs, real-world workflows—and building backward from there. Aragorn fits the way HR teams operate today, not a system designed to generate consulting fees.”

The startup said that for decades, HR has been forced to operate reactively, stitching together spreadsheets, dashboards, and brittle vendor integrations that don’t scale.

Managing HR integrations today is similar to building a product from scratch, the company noted, with every new system having its own data formats, governance rules, scheduling requirements, error handling, and ongoing maintenance. That complexity makes the process costly, time-consuming, and unreliable, leaving HR teams dependent on consultants and integration tools that can’t keep pace with modern needs, Aragorn said.

What the platform does

According to Aragorn, its platform delivers clean, real-time data across all HR systems; a connected framework that maps people, policies, and organizational structures into one source of truth; and agentic AI assistants that act instantly in Slack or Teams. The result: “HR teams that operate like modern product organizations—proactive, data-driven, and deeply strategic.”

Aragorn said its platform replaces point-to-point integrations and siloed dashboards with a unified system of intelligence. It combines three core capabilities:

Integrations Engine: Connects systems for payroll, benefits, ATS, LMS, and performance in days—not months.
Analytics Studio: Explores workforce trends and retention through interactive, no-code dashboards.
Agentic Studio: Lets HR teams deploy AI-powered analysts with zero engineering required.

 

At its core, Aragorn said it’s building the People Ops Operating System—helping HR teams manage integrations without consultants or engineers, unify data and analytics to answer workforce questions and forecast capacity, and deploy AI assistants that handle day-to-day reporting, compliance, benefits, and policy inquiries. All of this is powered by a unified data foundation that turns HR into a modern, intelligence-driven function.

More on Aragorn

Aragorn AI evolved out of a shared mission to fix one of HR’s most persistent challenges: fragmented, unreliable data.

Ed Adjei, a former VP of engineering at YourCause, helped scale the platform from 25 to more than 500 enterprise clients before its $157 million acquisition by Blackbaud—an experience the company said revealed how painful and repetitive HR integrations could be. Gladys Adjei, a former software engineer at Raytheon, brought expertise in secure, distributed systems to build reliability into every layer of the platform.

“Our mission is to turn HR into a technology-driven function—where managing employee data doesn’t require engineers or workarounds,” Ed Adjei said.

Clients now running the platform

Aragorn AI said it’s already powering HR teams at top enterprises, including Plaid, The Friedkin Group, Oak View Group, and others.

“Implementing Aragorn AI has been a complete game-changer for our team,” Amy Shorrosh, director of HR Operations & Associate Experience at The Friedkin Group, said. “It has simplified our HR integrations, allowed us to pivot more quickly, and enabled our team to operate far more efficiently.”

Venu Shamapant, co-founder and partner at LiveOak Ventures, called Aragorn “unique.”

“The HR market has seen countless chatbots and iPaaS tools, but Aragorn is something entirely new,” Shamapant said. “By combining a robust HR data framework with agentic AI, Aragorn is building the future operating system for People Ops. We’re proud to support Ed and the team as they scale.”

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