She built the company she wished she’d been hired into.
Co-CEO and co-founder of Leapsome - the people-enablement platform that turns workplace feedback from an awkward annual ritual into the operating system of a company.
The very first thing Leapsome could do was let one colleague tell another how they were doing. Instant feedback. That was the whole product. By Jenny von Podewils’ own admission, the early interface “wasn’t the prettiest.” What it had instead was a conviction: that the quiet thing missing from most fast-growing companies wasn’t talent or capital, it was an honest, repeatable way for people to learn from each other.
Today von Podewils is co-CEO and co-founder of a platform used by HR and people teams across two continents, running performance reviews, goals, engagement surveys, learning, and - still at its core - feedback. She runs it alongside her co-founder Kajetan von Armansperg, the two of them sharing the top job rather than splitting it into the usual hierarchy. The company employs roughly 140 people and, since early 2023, points its growth engine at the United States from a New York office she moved across the Atlantic to lead.
What makes her story unusual isn’t the funding headline. It’s the six years of silence before it. Leapsome was founded in 2016 and did not raise a cent of outside money until March 2022 - a $60 million Series A led by Insight Partners, with Europe’s Creandum and Visionaries Club alongside. By then the company had already bootstrapped its way to around $10 million in annual recurring revenue. Profitable, fast-growing, and self-funded. Most founders are told to pick two of those three. She declined.
The origin is almost suspiciously tidy for a product about feedback: both founders had worked inside fast-scaling companies where feedback structures simply didn’t exist, and they watched what that absence did to teams. Communication frayed. Relationships strained. The business paid for it. So they built the thing they’d been missing, and wrote it into their own company’s DNA before they sold it to anyone else. “This is why we built feedback into the Leapsome DNA,” she has said. “It remains a hugely important and decisive part of our company culture today.”
That conviction has a sharper edge than the usual corporate wellness language. Von Podewils argues that the single biggest lever for a feedback culture isn’t a tool or a policy - it’s a manager willing to turn the question around. The boss who regularly asks “how am I doing as your manager?” does more for the culture than any survey. Feedback, in her framing, is not a soft skill bolted onto leadership. It is the accelerator that makes leadership work at all.
Von Podewils did not arrive at people-management software through HR. Her route was stranger than that. She studied at the University of St. Gallen, where she did research on M&A transactions at its Institute of Management, then earned an M.Sc. at the University of Oxford between 2010 and 2011. Early roles read like a tour of unrelated frontiers: analyst on clean-development carbon projects in Africa at First Climate; sales and business development director for Europe at Younicos, selling large-scale battery storage; advisor to the CEO of DIE ZEIT, one of Germany’s most respected newspapers.
The pivot point was Silicon Valley. She was a fellow in Singularity University’s Global Solutions Program, an experience she credits with giving her the nerve to think on a different scale - to be, in her words, ambitious and visionary rather than incremental. She founded Leapsome at 30. The clean-energy and media detours weren’t a delay; they were a crash course in selling complex products to skeptical enterprises, which turned out to be exactly the muscle a B2B SaaS founder needs.
The patience eventually paid a dividend that money can’t buy. When Leapsome finally raised, it did so from a position of strength rather than need - choosing investors instead of chasing them, and using the round to accelerate an already-working machine rather than to find product-market fit. In 2022 the company doubled down on the U.S., opening in New York. In early 2023 von Podewils packed up Berlin and moved to run that expansion herself. Mid-2023 brought the recognition: Female Founder of the Year at the German Startup Awards.
Her ambition is stated plainly and aimed wide. “We aim to make work more fulfilling for everyone, everywhere.” It is the kind of line that would sound like marketing from most founders. From someone who bootstrapped for six years to build the culture first and the company around it, it reads more like a thesis she’s already been testing in production. More recently she has been vocal on reciprocal, cross-generational feedback - younger and older colleagues teaching each other - and on the AI-backed features moving through Leapsome’s pipeline.
The throughline from battery storage to a feedback platform isn’t obvious until you notice what every one of her jobs had in common: convincing organizations to adopt something better before they were sure they needed it. That, in the end, is the whole job. Leapsome is just the version where the product is the company itself.