performance-management
(24)
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.
palm.hr
palm.hr is a Riyadh-born, cloud-based HR and payroll platform built for small and mid-sized businesses across Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC. It brings employee data, time and attendance, WPS-compliant payroll, and employee engagement into one system that plugs directly into local government rails like GOSI and Mudad, so companies can run people operations that comply with regional labor law out of the box. Founded in 2019, it raised a $5M pre-Series A in 2023 to expand across MENA and pairs its software with an outsourced HR concierge service.
ZenHR
ZenHR is a cloud-based Human Resources Management System (HRMS) built specifically for the Middle East, North Africa and Gulf region. It automates payroll, attendance, onboarding, performance and recruitment while staying compliant with local labor laws, social insurance (GOSI), and wage protection (WPS) rules. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Riyadh, ZenHR serves companies from small businesses to large enterprises across markets including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and Iraq.
Tim Regnier
Tim Regnier is the CEO and co-founder of Smart Access, a frontline performance management software company he started in Edmonton, Alberta in 2015 and now runs from San Francisco. After nearly a decade running retail-tech ventures, Regnier built Smart Access to solve the visibility gap for managers on warehouse, manufacturing, and store floors, turning static SOPs into living documents and pairing them with AI-driven observations, coaching, and analytics. His guiding belief that 'all truth is found on the floor' has shaped a platform used by top retail and logistics enterprises, and the company raised a $12M Series A in 2026.
Flo
Flo (formerly Flo Recruit) is an Austin-based software company building the talent platform for the legal industry. It connects law firms, law schools, attorneys, and search firms through a connected suite of recruiting and performance-management tools - including an applicant tracking system, the Flo Forward career platform, pipeline building, and Flo AI. Founded in 2017 by University of Texas students Katherine Allen and Atreya Misra, the company works with roughly 70% of AmLaw 100 firms and 85% of the top 50 U.S. law schools.
HelloTeam
HelloTeam is a Boston-based HR technology company that builds an all-in-one employee engagement and performance management platform aimed at improving employee retention. Founded in 2016 by Tanya Bakalov, the software combines performance reviews, goals and OKRs, recognition and rewards, surveys, learning, a dynamic org chart, and people analytics into a single system so managers and HR teams can keep employees connected, engaged, and productive.
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.
Zencity
Zencity is a govtech company that builds the leading platform for community trust, purpose-built for local government. It combines AI-driven social listening, statistically representative resident surveys, and communication tools to help cities, counties, and public safety agencies understand what residents think and turn that input into decisions, budgets, and policy. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in New York and Tel Aviv, Zencity works with more than 600 government agencies and has raised roughly $93M in venture funding.
Keka HR
Keka HR is a cloud-based human resource, payroll and people-operations platform for small and mid-sized businesses. Founded in Hyderabad in 2014 by Vijay Yalamanchili, it bundles payroll, attendance, leave, performance, hiring and employee-engagement tools into a single self-serve system. After bootstrapping for years, Keka raised a $57 million Series A from WestBridge Capital in 2022 - reported as India's largest Series A in SaaS at the time - and now serves thousands of companies while processing payroll for more than a million employees each month.
Smart Access
Smart Access is an AI platform for frontline operations that closes the gap between how work is supposed to be done and how it actually gets done on the floor. Built for large retail, distribution, and logistics operations, it digitizes standard operating procedures, tracks frontline performance in real time, and turns floor-level observations into mobile coaching and skill-building for workers. Founded in 2015 by Tim Regnier and John White, the company raised a $12M Series A led by Lobby Capital.
WorkBoard
WorkBoard is a Redwood City-based enterprise SaaS company that builds an AI-native strategy execution and OKR platform. It helps large organizations set objectives and key results, align teams around them, automate business reviews, and track progress in real time so strategy turns into a repeatable 'operating rhythm.' Co-founded in 2014 by CEO Deidre Paknad and Daryoush Paknad, the company serves major enterprises including Boeing, 3M, Cisco, Capital One and Workday, and in 2025 acquired rival Quantive to consolidate the enterprise OKR market.
Tanya Bakalov
Tanya Bakalov is the CEO and founder of HelloTeam, a Boston-based employee engagement and performance management platform she started in 2016. A Bulgarian immigrant and University of Delaware accounting graduate, she left Deloitte in 2005 to co-found SevOne, the network monitoring company she scaled with her husband from three people to more than 500 employees and roughly $100M in revenue before its acquisition. A 2016 EY Entrepreneur of the Year and Inc. Female Founders 500 honoree, she raised a $10M Series A led in large part by payroll billionaire Tom Golisano and is pointing HelloTeam at AI-driven employee retention.
Nestor
Nestor is an AI-powered, skills-based talent management platform - a self-described People Intelligence Platform - that helps HR leaders, managers, and employees map, activate, and deploy the skills inside an organization. Built around a market library of 20,000+ skills and an AI companion, Nestor connects performance management, employee engagement, and career development so companies can spot skill gaps, run an internal talent marketplace, and make workforce decisions based on capability rather than job titles.
Paismo
Paismo is a people-first, AI-powered HR and payroll platform built for small and mid-sized businesses in emerging markets. Founded in 2022 by University of Pennsylvania alumni Rebecka Zavaleta and Usama Mahmud, it combines core HR, time and attendance, leave, performance management and automated payroll into one cloud system - with localized features designed from the ground up for markets that legacy HR software has long ignored. Backed by a $1.5M seed haul led by Indus Valley Capital, Paismo now spans the US, UAE, Pakistan, Mexico and Ethiopia, and has layered on Employer of Record services and a one-click payroll partnership with easypaisa.
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.
Alexei Dunaway
Alexei Dunaway is the founder and CEO of Pinnacle, a New York and Palo Alto based startup building Pascal, an AI performance and career coach that lives inside Slack, Teams, and Zoom. A Stanford GSB graduate and Fulbright Scholar, he spent five years building an entrepreneur accelerator in Kenya before running an executive coaching practice for venture-backed founders. He now wants to give every worker the kind of coaching that used to be reserved for the C-suite. Pinnacle raised a $2.5M seed round in March 2025 led by eLab Ventures.
Cascade
Cascade is a strategy execution platform that pulls corporate strategy out of slide decks and boardrooms and turns it into a living, trackable system the whole organization can run on. It combines strategic planning, OKRs, projects, KPIs and outcome tracking - now layered with AI insights via its Tapestry suite - into one platform so leaders can see whether the plan is actually working. Founded in 2017 and used by thousands of teams across 100+ countries, from vaccine supply chains to Formula One teams.
Leapsome
Leapsome is an AI-powered people enablement platform that unifies the HR stack - performance reviews, goals and OKRs, engagement surveys, learning, compensation, and a core HRIS - in one place. Founded in Berlin in 2016 by Jenny von Podewils and Kajetan von Armansperg, it helps managers and HR teams run feedback, development, and alignment processes without juggling spreadsheets and disconnected tools. The company bootstrapped to profitability before raising a $60M Series A in 2022, and today serves more than 1,500 organizations including Spotify, Unity, and monday.com.
Jenny von Podewils
Jenny von Podewils is the co-CEO and co-founder of Leapsome, the people enablement platform she launched in Berlin in 2016 with Kajetan von Armansperg. After bootstrapping the company to roughly $10 million in annual recurring revenue, the pair raised a $60 million Series A in March 2022 led by Insight Partners - their first outside money in six years. Trained at St. Gallen, Oxford, and Singularity University, she relocated from Berlin to New York in early 2023 to scale Leapsome's U.S. business, and was named Female Founder of the Year at the 2023 German Startup Awards.
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.
Lattice
Lattice is a San Francisco-based people-management software company that helps organizations run performance reviews, set goals, gather employee feedback, manage compensation, and track engagement in one connected platform. Founded in 2015 by Jack Altman and Eric Koslow, it now serves several thousand companies and has leaned hard into AI under CEO Sarah Franklin, who joined from Salesforce in 2024.
Humand
Humand is a mobile-first, all-in-one HR platform built for the 2.7 billion deskless and frontline workers who have never had a proper digital work home. Founded in 2020 by Nicolas Benenzon and Geronimo Maspero, the platform combines 30+ HR modules - from internal communications and payroll to performance reviews and AI-powered automation - into a single app. With 1.6 million workers across 1,500+ organizations in 51 countries, and a $66M Series A raised in February 2026 co-led by Kaszek and Goodwater Capital, Humand is positioning itself as the operating system for the world's largest workforce segment.
Bogdan Apostol
Bogdan Apostol is the co-founder and CEO of Nestor, a San Francisco-based AI-powered people intelligence platform that helps enterprises build skills-based organizations. A Romanian-born computer scientist with a PhD in Computer Vision from Gheorghe Asachi Technical University, he founded Nestor in 2018 after being accepted into Y Combinator's S18 batch. Before writing a single line of product code, he conducted over 400 customer discovery calls. Nestor has raised $6.07M in funding, serves 10,000+ employees worldwide across F500 companies, and has earned 67 G2 badges including a perfect 10/10 for quality of support.
Roy Rapoport
Roy Rapoport is a veteran engineering leader and writer whose work has quietly reshaped how tech companies think about people, reliability, and operational culture. Best known for his two stints at Netflix (where he built Insight Engineering and its operational platform) and a stint at Slack, Roy popularized the Manager README format and authored influential frameworks on feedback, trust, and performance improvement. He writes on Medium about the subtler mechanics of leadership, raises goats in California, and insists he will never retire.