Behind the Investment: Pathlight – Defining a Data-Driven Management Era

Are you constantly switching between numerous tabs and productivity platforms to pull together data on your team or a specific employee? Are you unable to clearly see how they are performing relative to KPIs? Are you having a hard time coaching and communicating with your frontline workers?

If you’re a manager of any team, but specifically customer facing teams (sales, field service, and support), you are likely nodding right now. During the last year, these pain points have been felt more intensely than ever before as we’ve been working with either all, or part of our teams in remote environments. Like everyone, Insight has been forced to think about the future of work. But stopping here isn’t enough; we must rethink the way we manage our workforce.

The conditions - both technical and cultural - now exist for a platform to transform management. Data is more abundant and accessible than ever, which has spearheaded a data-driven culture to standardize performance methods through KPIs. As we move more and more towards a hybrid working environment, companies are desperately searching for ways to manage and communicate with distributed teams.

Enter Pathlight, the platform defining “Leadership 2.0.” Pathlight connects with platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk, Outreach, among others, to pull data together into a single pane of glass. A manager now has a bird’s eye view on their overall team and an individual’s performance, mapped against the different parameters set by management. Using this data, managers can easily initiate conversations with individual employees to focus on specific areas that need improvement, provide coaching, and send out team-wide updates and encouragement. In turn, by getting direct access to these metrics, the front line is empowered to be more independent, and the feedback loop strengthens.

Other vendors have chipped away at certain parts of this challenge, but none have married together the pillars of data and communication; there are sales-productivity platforms (e.g. Ambition), BI tools (e.g. Looker, Periscope), activity tracking tools (e.g. ActivTrak), LMS’s (e.g. Lessonly), etc. Pathlight stands alone – they are a category-defining company taking a horizontal, business-user-led approach with no known direct competitors.

We first met Pathlight’s CEO, Alex Kvamme, in June 2020. Alex became acutely aware of this pain point when Yelp acquired his first startup SeatMe. At Yelp, he realized that there was a lack of visibility in terms of team performance, individual performance, and no effective way to communicate when something needed changing. Since launching in March 2020, Pathlight has onboarded customers like Twilio, Earnin, CLEAR, and many more.

Believing in the team, product, and opportunity, we are excited to be leading Pathlight’s $25M financing round alongside previous investors Kleiner Perkins and Quiet capital, and participation from new backers including Uncorrelated Ventures; Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp; David Glazer, CFO of Palantir; and Michael Ovitz, co-founder of CAA and owner of Broad Beach Ventures. We look forward to watching Pathlight power the new era of integrated data-driven management.