The first person Elfie hired was a designer. For a company led by someone who had spent two decades in software, that is a pleasing detail. Ofir Ejnes knew what engineers could make. In February 2021, his new company put a lead UX designer to work before its engineers began writing code in May. There would be time enough for the machinery. First came the question of how another person would use it.
Elfie had been incorporated the previous December. By September, a private version was ready. Those dates contain a small argument about company building: preparation belongs on the calendar alongside production. The months before a release can be difficult to photograph. A screen full of code at least looks industrious. Understanding an audience requires less theatrical evidence.
Ejnes had already done a long apprenticeship in the practical business of making software for other organizations. His earlier company, PYCOGroup, began in Belgium in 1999 and established operations in Vietnam in 2001. Elfie was a new venture, with a new co-founder, after a career measured in decades. Starting again meant choosing the order of operations again, too.
The years before the app
His education preceded that first company: he studied at Solvay Brussels School from 1995 to 1998, earning a bachelor’s degree in computer science. The dates place formal study immediately before the founding of Pyramid Consulting. The later advisory appointments and company leadership extended his work beyond the technical discipline on the degree. The professional record brings those responsibilities together: a computing education, a software company and the business of helping other organizations choose and implement technology.
PYCOGroup started as Pyramid Consulting, developing digital and web projects. Its work broadened from websites and mobile applications for advertising agencies into software development for multinational clients. That progression matters in Ejnes’s story. He was building a company while the scope of the work itself was changing, with teams expected to deliver across industries and borders.
By May 2014, PYCOGroup was marking its fifteenth anniversary globally and its thirteenth in Vietnam. At a celebration in Ho Chi Minh City, it announced plans to recruit more than 100 people. The proposed roles stretched from engineering and architecture to project management, design, business analysis and quality control. A software business, viewed through its hiring list, becomes a rather human assembly.
Ejnes and fellow co-founder David Dzialowski used the anniversary to credit the people working in the company and to reaffirm their investment in Vietnam. The message was attached to actual recruitment plans. Keeping an international operation working required more than a persuasive account of the future. Someone had to manage the project, understand the customer, make the interface and check whether the thing behaved.
PYCOGroup’s client roster included Microsoft, Volkswagen and Samsung. The variety is revealing: a company making software for others must learn to work inside different organizations’ priorities. A motor manufacturer and a software company may buy from the same supplier, but they bring their own expectations to the meeting. Ejnes’s first company grew in that world of other people’s briefs.
- 1999Pyramid Consulting begins in Belgium
- 2001The Vietnam operation opens
- 2020Ejnes co-founds Elfie
- 2025Elfie announces its Series A
A second beginning, with a different partner
Ejnes’s career also took him into executive advisory work. At McCann Worldgroup, his work concerned digital transformation and technology implementation. At Microsoft, it concerned e-commerce strategy. Those roles put another dimension beside the founder’s title: helping established organizations work through decisions about technology. His professional history crosses the border between building a supplier and advising the organizations that buy.
Then the first company’s story reached a junction. When Dzialowski announced PYCOGroup’s combination with Positive Thinking Company in 2021, he singled out Ejnes as a co-founder who would be exploring new opportunities. He wished him success. It was a public farewell that acknowledged a shared history while leaving room for separate futures.
That distinction is easy to lose in a career summary. A founder’s next venture can look inevitable once it is placed below the previous one on a page. At the time, it is another organization to establish, another team to assemble and another relationship with a co-founder to make work. Experience supplies context; the new company still needs its own answers.
Elfie was co-founded in 2020 by Ejnes and Jean-Francois Legourd. Ejnes became CEO; Legourd became COO. Their responsibilities brought product and execution together with operations and growth. The new partnership had its own division of labor. Twenty years in one business did not remove the need to work out who would carry what in the next.
A designer gets there first
The early Elfie calendar offers a concrete look at that next chapter. The designer arrived in February 2021. Engineering began in May, after the company had established client traction and an advantage in reaching its market. The sequence suggests a founder paying attention to what must happen around a product before the product can travel.
There is an ordinary commercial question underneath the chronology: who will put this in front of people? Software can be made available long before it becomes part of anyone’s day. For a new company, distribution has to survive contact with institutions, contracts and actual users. A functioning application answers one question. A workable route to an audience answers another.
The first private release followed in September. Vietnam and Brazil launches came later in 2021. The ambition was international from an early stage, with the awkward practical consequences that international ambitions tend to bring. Two markets mean more than two points on a presentation slide. They mean a product encountering different settings, languages and expectations.
For Ejnes, this was a change in the relationship between the company and its work. PYCOGroup delivered digital solutions to clients. At Elfie, the founders were responsible for a platform with an identity of its own. They had to bring the product, its users and its commercial partners into a working arrangement. The calendar shows them attending to that arrangement before rushing to the keyboard.
The other person at the table
There is a less formal way into Ejnes’s history. When he met Vietnam Innovators host Hao Tran, they discovered a business connection in common: Guy Truong. For Ejnes, the partnership went back to 1999. For Tran, it began in 2016. Seventeen years separated the two beginnings; a single name connected them.
Tran recounted the discovery while introducing Ejnes to his wider community. It is the kind of detail that gives a career some texture. Company histories prefer incorporations and financing dates. People remember who introduced whom, who worked with whom and the moment a new acquaintance turns out to belong to an old story.
The connection also places Ejnes within a continuing network around Vietnam’s technology businesses. His work there reaches back to PYCOGroup’s early operation, and his public professional profile lists the Ho Chi Minh City metropolitan area. The country appears in both major chapters of his career. It provides continuity without requiring the two companies to be versions of the same idea.
A round number, a longer job
On June 25, 2025, Elfie announced a $12 million Series A led by White Star Capital. LifeX Ventures participated alongside existing investors Integra Partners, FEBE Ventures and Hustle Fund. The plans included expanding partnerships and adding product, engineering and commercial talent in the United States. The investment gave the next stage a budget and a set of stated priorities.
White Star’s investment account highlighted the founders’ complementary backgrounds: Ejnes’s product and execution experience in Southeast Asia, and Legourd’s operational background in consulting and venture capital. Investors were backing a partnership as well as a platform. By then, the team had already built an international business with less than $5 million raised before the round.
Elfie’s Series A, led by White Star Capital
Ejnes’s own announcement spread the credit across his co-founder, team, investors and commercial partners. It ended with a short invitation: “This is just the beginning. Watch us.” After a career stretching back to 1999, the word “beginning” had a certain mileage. Founders are allowed more than one, provided they are willing to do the work attached to each.
“This is just the beginning. Watch us.”
Ofir Ejnes · announcing Elfie’s funding
What survives a fresh start
The announced US hiring plans make a useful counterpart to PYCOGroup’s earlier recruitment in Vietnam. Both milestones turn an expansion story into a question about people and specific work. Product, engineering and commercial roles have different responsibilities, even when they sit beneath the same company name. For a founder, securing capital and building that working organization are successive tasks. The announcement gives the ambition a public date; recruitment gives it colleagues.
The useful thread through Ejnes’s career is the attention paid to building an organization around the software. At PYCOGroup, that meant multidisciplinary teams delivering work across borders. At Elfie, it meant a new co-founder, a designer hired early, commercial preparation and then engineering. These are documented choices, each made in a particular company at a particular time.
They offer a more interesting portrait than the founder title alone. Ejnes has worked with other founders, advised established businesses and started again after a long first chapter. His career carries the marks of collaboration: Dzialowski’s farewell, Legourd’s operating role, Tran’s discovery of a shared partner. The people around the ventures remain part of the story.
Return to the designer hired in February. It is a modest beginning to place beside a funding announcement, but it gives the larger story a human scale. Before a company can grow, someone has to decide what another person will encounter. In Ejnes’s second act, that work had a place at the table before the code did.