Announcing $3.6M Round from Andreessen Horowitz to Kill the Annual Performance Review

The idea to start Reflektive came to me while I was working at Disney Interactive, where I was building mobile games. I managed a team of more than 80 people and was charged with creating games designed to bring users back time and time again. As a result, I quickly learned the nuances of building an engaging product.

At the same time, I had to learn how to build and create a highly engaged team that could deliver an engaging product. For the middle managers in particular, I found that getting them to focus on employee development was a sizable and complex challenge. We all know that investing time to coach your employees is extremely important – it can mean the difference between a highly productive employee and one that is disengaged and eventually leaves. After researching a variety of different talent management products to support my team, I realized that they ended up taxing employees rather than enabling them.

This led me to creating Reflektive – I wanted to blow up the old paradigm of talent management and re-build it to empower employees and managers, not stifle them. Our belief is that the future of employee performance feedback is real-time, intuitive and engaging.

Since January 2015, we’ve grown revenue by 350 percent. 45 companies have deployed Reflektive including Pinterest, Glassdoor, Lyft, Optimizely, Instacart and Thumbtack.

Today, we’re proud to announce we have raised $3.6 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, led by their General Partner, Lars Dalgaard. As founder and CEO of Successfactors – the original disrupter of talent management.

The funding will support development and expansion of our real-time employee performance, engagement, and analytics platform that re-invents the way people give feedback. Time and time again, we’ve heard that employees dislike performance reviews because they’re inaccurate, take too much time to complete, and don’t actually help with career development.

Our goal is to help employees to improve and develop, but also to make them feel valued and become more engaged. With Reflektive, we enable employees to give each other instant feedback through a simple, intuitive interface without leaving their core workflows.

“At Pinterest, we’ve put company culture and employee development at the top of our priority-list. With that in mind, we partnered with Reflektive to build Check-Ins, a performance review system that allows for frequent, real-time feedback. The lightweight functionality of Check-Ins facilitate conversations between our managers and their teams, creating an environment where our employees can learn and grow more rapidly.” – Mike Joyner, People Operations Manager, Pinterest

“Rajeev is channeling his experience building successful gaming products into the development of enterprise software that apply gaming dynamics to surprise and delight users. For example, the capturing of synchronous and dynamic people performance assessment in-stream with daily email and business dialog has turned into a fast-growing revenue stream that is very promising.” – Lars Dalgaard, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz

By designing intuitive, engaging, and data-driven management tools that empower employees, our aim is to redefine the future of work.