leadership-development
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Petra Coach Turned the Quarterly Offsite Into a Business Operating System
Most business coaches sell advice. Petra Coach sells a cadence - one strategic coach, one accountability coach, and enough public scorekeeping to make a leadership team’s promises difficult to forget.
The 68-Year-Old Idea That Turns Lonely CEOs Into a Board of 15 Rivals
It started with one businessman in Milwaukee who thought CEOs shouldn't have to figure it out alone. Almost seven decades later, 45,000 executives pay monthly dues to sit in a room and be told the truth.
Most Leadership Training Fails. Droste Group Bet Its Business on the Fix.
A woman-owned firm in the shadow of Detroit's auto plants built its business on a blunt premise: most leadership training doesn't stick. Here is how Droste Group tries to make it stick anyway.
The Recruiter Who Went Rogue for Women in the C-Suite
Tracy Saunders spent two decades placing executives for Google, Amazon and Cisco. Then she flipped the model - and built a discreet network that gets senior women hired, paid and promoted without the noise.
Cardone Ventures Wants to Make the Owner the Least Essential Person in the Room
The 10X brand supplies the volume. Cardone Ventures supplies the operating system - a four-part method designed to help established business owners build companies that can grow without depending on them for every decision.
The Business Where the Product Is a Room Full of People Who Cannot Talk Elsewhere
World 50 built a business around a C-suite paradox: the higher an executive rises, the fewer people they can speak to freely. Its answer is a paid, invitation-only network where candor - carefully curated and kept off the record - is the product.
AcuityX Wants to Fix the Expensive Gap Between the Plan and the Work
The Abu Dhabi consultancy has bundled company formation, executive search, advisory and people performance into one operator-led firm. Its bet is that strategy works better when the people advising have also carried the operational consequences.
ActionCOACH Global
ActionCOACH turned an intangible service - advice - into a repeatable franchise sold in more than 80 countries. Its real product is a weekly rhythm that helps owners replace improvisation with systems.
Korn Ferry
Korn Ferry began with one phone, one assistant and a Rolodex. Now the $2.9 billion firm wants its data, consultants and software inside every consequential decision a company makes about people.
Scale Yourself
Scale Yourself is a coaching and content platform for venture-backed startup founders, built by Amy Buechler - a licensed psychotherapist who spent nearly five years as Y Combinator's first in-house founder coach. It combines one-on-one coaching, a vetted network of ex-founder coaches, and a free framework library called The User Manual for Founder Psychology to help founders scale their psychology, relationships, and leadership alongside their companies.
EngageRocket
EngageRocket is a Singapore-based HR technology company that turns continuous employee feedback into actionable people-analytics. Founded in 2016 by two former Gallup leaders, its cloud platform runs engagement, lifecycle and pulse surveys (BELONG), 360-degree and multi-rater feedback (GROW), and performance workflows (PERFORM), pairing survey software with people-science advisory. It serves enterprises across 30+ countries - including Toyota, Sephora, Nikon, Epson and CGS-CIMB - to improve engagement, reduce turnover and support data-informed HR decisions.
Hispanic Scholarship Fund
The Hispanic Scholarship Fund (HSF) is a national nonprofit, founded in 1975, that empowers Latino families with the knowledge and resources to complete a higher education, while providing scholarships and support services to as many students as possible. Beyond financial awards ranging from $500 to $5,000, HSF connects roughly 10,000 selected Scholars each year to mentoring, career conferences, internships and employer partners. Through 2022 it had distributed more than $700 million in scholarships, and it now serves over 40,000 Scholars, alumni, parents and community members annually across the United States and Puerto Rico.
Timah Partners
Timah Partners is a Singapore-based permanent holding company that acquires essential, recurring B2B SMEs across Southeast Asia and holds them for the long term, with no intent to flip. Founded by Dennis Chua, it pairs patient capital with a CEO Succession (CEO-in-Training) program that develops the next generation of operators to run its portfolio companies. The firm positions itself as a permanent home for owners who lack a succession plan, prioritizing culture, founder legacy, and operational stewardship over quick exits. It closed a US$50 million Series A in June 2025.
Leadr
Leadr is a Texas-based B2B SaaS company that builds continuous-performance software to help managers develop the people who report to them. Positioned as an operating system for managers, the platform brings 1-on-1 meetings, goal setting, feedback, engagement surveys, reviews and AI meeting tools into one place. Founded in 2019 by veterans of the church-tech unicorn Pushpay, Leadr raised a $10M Series A led by Bedrock and works toward a stated mission of developing one million leaders. Its customers span businesses, hospitals, nonprofits, churches and educational institutions.
ibelong
ibelong is a San Francisco-based consultancy that helps organizations build inclusive, resonant workplace cultures using a neurochemical framework grounded in affective neuroscience, relational neurobiology and epigenetics. Led by CEO and epigenetic coach Rajkumari Neogy, the company translates the brain science of trust and belonging into practical programs - immersive courses, leadership coaching, compassion circles and layoff (RIF) support - aimed at reducing conflict, burnout and turnover. Formerly known as iRestart, ibelong has worked with leaders at more than 175 startups and enterprises.
Pandatron
Pandatron is an AI change-activation platform that helps large enterprises turn strategy into execution. Its conversational AI runs private, role-tailored coaching conversations with thousands of employees at once, then feeds leaders real-time behavioral intelligence on readiness, resistance and risk. Founded in Helsinki and now with a San Francisco presence, Pandatron works with Fortune 500 companies including SAP, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Merck and Skanska to make coaching-driven change dramatically cheaper and more measurable.
Athena Alliance
Athena Alliance is a subscription community and learning platform that helps senior women executives build what it calls a 'Portfolio of Impact' - advancing into the C-suite, onto corporate boards, and into investing, entrepreneurship, and thought leadership. Founded in 2016 by Coco Brown, it blends a curated peer network, a learning library, 1:1 coaching, live salons, and direct board-opportunity matching. Its membership spans leaders from companies like Microsoft, Alphabet, Disney, Databricks, and Stripe, and the organization says it has helped place hundreds of women on corporate boards.
Encore Vet Group
Encore Vet Group is a Saratoga Springs, New York-based community of veterinary hospitals founded in 2018 by Ted Sprinkle, DVM, Lance Sprinkle, and Bo Iler. Rather than running a top-down corporate chain, Encore acquires established community and legacy veterinary practices and then hands the day-to-day medicine and culture back to the local teams while layering on business support, leadership training, and mental-health resources. Backed by private-equity firm North Castle Partners, the group has grown to roughly 60 hospitals and around 1,900-2,200 team members, and it operates education platforms like Encore Performance Academy and the MentorCore virtual mentorship program for new graduates.
Katahdin Group
Katahdin Group is a Boston-based leadership development and peer advisory firm that runs process-driven CEO and executive peer groups plus strategic planning programs for leaders of mid-market growth companies. Founded in 1999 as The Raffoni Group by Melissa Raffoni out of Inc. Magazine's discontinued 'Inc. Eagles' CEO program, it uses a case-method meeting format so CEOs can get candid, structured feedback from peers. It rebranded to Katahdin Group - named after Maine's Mount Katahdin, 'The Greatest Mountain' - to evoke the climb of building and eventually exiting a business.
Keep Company
Keep Company is a Bethesda, Maryland based B2B platform that helps employers build meaningful human connection at work through cohort-based group coaching, 1:1 coaching, mentoring, and peer pods. Founded in 2022 by a former partner-track lawyer and a startup brand executive, it began by tackling burnout and attrition among working parents and caregivers - a group that can make up the majority of a workforce - and has since grown into a broader platform for connection and engagement across the employee lifecycle, backed by patented matching technology and a behavioral-science curriculum.
KRW International
KRW International is a global leadership consulting firm that treats character as a measurable business input, not a soft one. Built around the seven-year Return on Character research led by co-founder Fred Kiel, the firm uses proprietary assessments and predictive analytics to help CEOs, senior teams, and boards close the gap between who they intend to be and how they are actually experienced. Its pitch - coaching based on data, not opinion - reframes integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion as habits that correlate with returns, engagement, and reduced risk.
Mento
Mento is a performance-coaching platform that pairs leaders and teams with 1:1 executive coaches, adds a lighter layer of mentorship, and uses AI to connect what happens between sessions. Built on an 80/20 coaching-to-mentorship methodology and staffed by former C-suite, VP, and director-level coaches, Mento sells leadership development to companies that want to grow and keep their highest performers. Co-founded in 2019 by Jamie Albers and Alex Marcus, the Los Angeles company counts Anthropic, Dropbox, Brex, Gusto, and Vercel among its clients.
Pinnacle - AI Coaching
Pinnacle is a New York-based HR-tech startup building scalable AI coaching that lives inside the tools employees already use. Its AI coach, Pascal, embeds in Slack, Microsoft Teams, and video meetings to give managers and employees personalized, real-time guidance drawn from their actual work context - performance reviews, 360 feedback, company competency frameworks, and day-to-day communication patterns. Founded by former accelerator CEO and executive coach Alexei Dunaway, Pinnacle raised a $2.5M seed round in March 2025 to bring executive-grade coaching to every employee, not just the C-suite.
Sayge
Sayge is a New York-based coaching platform that gives everyday employees - not just executives - ongoing 1:1 access to vetted, ICF-certified professional coaches. Founded in 2017 by Jamie Bryan and Katie Stricker under the banner 'Coaching for the Rest of Us,' the company pairs employees with a personal coach, runs biweekly virtual sessions, and hands employers dashboards that track progress and impact. After raising $1.75M in seed funding, Sayge was acquired by employee-benefits platform Bennie in October 2023 and now operates as part of Bennie's benefits suite.
Tenor
Tenor is a San Francisco AI platform that helps managers get better at the human part of the job. Through hyper-realistic voice AI role-play simulations trained on a company's own leadership approach, managers rehearse high-stakes conversations - performance reviews, layoffs, conflict, feedback - in a safe space and get instant, coaching-style feedback. Founded in 2023 by former Workday leaders Charlie Stigler and James Cross, Tenor raised a $5.4M seed round led by Base10 Partners in December 2024.
Hone
Hone is a San Diego-area software company that delivers leadership and human-skills training to enterprises through small-group, live virtual classes led by expert facilitators, paired with program-management technology and, since 2025, a voice-first AI coach called Hone AI. Founded in 2018 by FanDuel co-founder Tom Griffiths and former CultureIQ leaders, Hone helps companies deploy, manage, and measure manager, leadership, and DEIB training at scale for distributed and hybrid teams. It has trained more than 50,000 people for customers including IBM, Rubrik, Thumbtack, and Rover.
Valence
Valence builds Nadia, an enterprise AI coach deployed across the Fortune 500 to give every employee always-on, personalized leadership and performance coaching. Founded by Parker Mitchell, the New York company pivoted from team-performance software to generative AI coaching after the release of ChatGPT, and now runs 50+ global deployments and more than one million coaching conversations with NPS scores consistently above 90. It raised a $50M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners in September 2025.
Chief
Chief is a private membership network built for senior women executives - VPs, C-suite leaders, and the rungs just below. It pairs members into facilitated peer 'Core' groups led by executive coaches, layers on workshops, curated events, and physical clubhouses in major U.S. cities, and aims to close the gap at the top of the corporate ladder by giving women the kind of back-channel network that has long been reserved for men. Founded in 2019, Chief became one of the fastest female-founded U.S. companies to reach a $1 billion valuation.
AceUp
AceUp is a Boston-based leadership development company that pairs human coaches with AI-powered people analytics to make executive and team coaching measurable and scalable. Through a network of thousands of ICF-certified coaches and a data platform it calls Ally, AceUp helps enterprises like IBM, L'Oreal and LVMH turn coaching - long treated as a perk for the C-suite - into a quantifiable driver of engagement, alignment and performance.
BetterUp
BetterUp is a San Francisco-founded human transformation company that pairs certified human coaches, behavioral science, and AI to deliver personalized professional and leadership development at enterprise scale. It coaches employees at hundreds of companies and government agencies, blending one-on-one coaching, assessments, and data-driven insights, and has increasingly moved toward AI-powered coaching that runs around the clock.