This AI coach just raised $50M and is transforming work at Delta, KraftHeinz, Prudential, and moreCoaching hasn’t scaled—until now.
✨ Hey there this is a free edition of next play’s newsletter, where we share under-the-radar opportunities to help you figure out what’s next in your journey. Join our private Slack community here and access $1000s of dollars of product discounts here. If you only have a minute or two, here’s what you should know about Valence and their AI coach Nadia.
There is good reason for the hype that early founding teams get: it is hard to hide being ineffective when it’s you and five other people on a team. The founder(s) can set the standards and verify them manually. Every piece of work is visible to everyone. Taste and productivity become automatic; the whole team can work as one productive unit. This is good, for a while. But then the company scales. As a company hires 100, 1,000, or 10,000 employees, no single person can have visibility into everything. Some wings of the organization are more productive than others. Culture morphs and becomes asymmetric across people, teams, functions. This quality slippage, almost an expected outcome for enterprises, is frequently cited as the reason large companies become slower. What would it take to make the biggest companies as agile and productive as the most ambitious startups? Well, if you were going to design a solution without any limitations, one idea would be to hire one full-time coach for every single employee at your company. This coach would:
Of course, this is an impossible idea. No company can afford to immediately double their headcount, and no coach can hold infinite context in their heads (nor can any coach be available 24/7). As it stands, traditional wisdom goes, companies cannot execute on this ambitious but impossible idea. … Or can they? Valence, co-founded by Parker Mitchell, Alex McMurray, and Levi Goertz, has built an AI coach, Nadia, that can truly understand and anticipate the needs of employeeso make everyone—especially managers and leaders—more effective and collaborative. So far, so good. Valence:
I wanted to dig deeper into what Valence is building, why, and who might be a good fit to work there. So I sat down with the team to figure out why they’re building what they are—and whether you should join. Thanks to Valence for chatting with me and for supporting Next Play.
Coaching is effective, but expensive and difficult to scaleIt is not a novel practice to hire a coach, especially for your executives: today, the market for doing so is about $103B in the United States. Companies know that good coaching can make their leaders, and thus their companies, more effective. So they shell out a lot of cash to coaches. Traditionally, though, coaching has been rather limited. Perhaps you hire some expensive outside help to coach a handful of your VPs who you think could benefit the most. Perhaps you build an internal coaching program for high-performance employees, like what Prudential (now a Valence customer) did. Whatever you do, though, you typically aren’t doing it across the entire organization for every manager and for every employee; at least not in any personalized capacity. Good coaches are hard to find, have limited availability, and are expensive. So you do the best with what you have—targeted 1:1s for certain execs, group workshops for some, and nothing for the rest. But what if every single employee had a world-class coach on demand?This is the version of the world that LLMs could make possible. On paper, a technology like ChatGPT is a perfect solution to the coaching problem—it is basically an infinite text generation tool that can sometimes come up with really smart answers and can hold a lot of context in its head. (And many people already use ChatGPT on their own for coaching-like needs.) If ChatGPT is so miraculous, though, then where are all of these 10X companies? Why doesn’t every employee at every company already have this genius, 1:1 coach to help them? This is where reality gets complicated and where Valence may have an edge. Back in August, MIT came out with a landmark report that 95% of AI pilots are failing. This lined up with what I’ve seen more anecdotally; big, hype-y promises about the potential for AI were clashing with the actual reality of what these software products could do. At many companies, this reality was disappointing. No, AI can’t (usually) replace all of your smartest employees 1:1. No, AI can’t magically do many of the things flashy marketing statements say it can. No, you are (probably) not going to build a multi-billion dollar company today by firing all of your employees and replacing them with virtual AI agents. “The future is not humans versus machines,” Das Rush, Valence’s Head of Marketing, told me. “The future is humans with AI.” It is becoming increasingly clear that AI is not a silver bullet to use however you please, but rather a potentially useful technology that can be made actually useful when it’s developed by a team of effective people for a specific purpose (e.g. Cursor for coding). “AI is ushering in the era of mass personalization,” Parker Mitchell, the CEO of Valence, said. And so Valence’s goal is both simple and timely: not to build a generic LLM tool, but to create truly useful and personal AI coach that can make every single employee more effective. Building a personalized AI coach with a 98% pilot success rate Valence has always been about making teams more effective and believes they are the essence of how modern knowledge work gets done. “Before ChatGPT came along,” Parker said, “our very first product was a paper prototype about understanding your team. I brought a dozen copies to a conference, sidling up to attendees, and [sent] them a photo of their answers along with some advice.” ChatGPT launched in 2022, shortly after Valence raised a $25M Series A. They quickly pivoted to building personalized AI coaching for enterprises and by the end of 2022 their coach was in its first enterprise pilots. Today, their flagship product Nadia is used by 50+ of Fortune 500 companies—is an AI coach called Nadia. Nadia’s secret sauce isn’t a model, it’s context and memory. Out of the box, Nadia is purpose-built to draw from the best coaching practices and frameworks. Valence then specializes in customizing Nadia to each company, training her to coach to the specific goals, culture and dynamics of the company. But most powerfully, Nadia is designed to build more context with each coaching conversation, so that the more she coaches, the better she gets. Nadia does what a good human coach would do. She looks at an employee’s tendencies. At what they have going on. At what their relationships are with other people at the company. At what they’ve struggled with (and done well at) in the past. Then she provides effective, objective analysis and feedback to help the person become more effective (based, of course, on the company’s priorities). Nadia is working: 98% of Valence’s pilots are successful. Prudential 9X’d the reach of their global coaching program with Nadia. Experian had a pilot fully up and running within 6 weeks, and has now expanded access to Nadia to a third of their workforce. Delta used Nadia to improve 97% of their yearly performance reviews. Real enterprises with real problems are, seemingly, seeing real results. These numbers are substantial outliers—remember, 95% of AI pilots seem to be failing. Valence’s traction so far appears not to be the norm, but perhaps something rather exceptional. And, coupled with their $50M Series B just a few months ago, they are in a position to hit the gas pedal. But how are they doing it? Why is Valence selling to Fortune 500 customers and succeeding with almost all of their pilots when the industry standard appears to be far worse? The answer may lie with the impressive team and hard-working culture they have built. A sharp, mission-focused team that’s scaled companies beforePerhaps the reason Valence has been so good at selling to Fortune 500 companies (often a difficult leap for startups to make) is because they practice what they preach. It’s a culture deeply committed to being the most AI-first of workplaces and using AI to reinvent how they scale as a company. Co-founders, Parker Mitchell, Alex McMurray, and Levi Goertz are obsessed with rapid-fire experimentation and solving problems from first principles. If you need to “operate from a list of best practices,” I was told, Valence is not your place. (Refreshing!) The team is high-caliber, too. Ana Martinez, Valence’s Engineering lead, was formerly the Director of Engineering at Slack. Das Rush, who is the VP of Marketing, formerly ran content for a16z’s growth fund. Other teammates (like Kira Luscher, growth, Mehwish Panjwani, client solutions, and Ellie Wildman, strategy) have deep backgrounds in consulting and industry, but a hunger to apply abstract theory to real world deployments.
According to Daniel Owens (client solutions), “A lot of us come from consulting backgrounds, where the work is often theoretical. At Valence, there’s a refreshing shift—it’s all about real-life behavior change and measurable outcomes. You’ll see people spinning up an MVP in a day, running experiments with real users, and using what we learn to build better solutions immediately.”
This theme (collaborative, hard-working, focused) was echoed by everyone I talked to:
These are generally good things to hear if you are interested in joining a startup that gets things done and cares about building a useful product. But I wanted to dig a bit deeper on who, exactly, Valence is the right fit for—so you can make up your mind about whether this may be a company worth joining. Should you join Valence?
Over time, companies often start to develop a sort of “vibe”, a certain way of doing things that makes some people a better fit than others. I wanted to learn what kinds of people, exactly, would do well at Valence. Below are a few pieces of information I think you may find useful. On routine: “There is honestly no average day [at Valence]. The job varies so much from one day to the next.” — Mehwish Panjwani, Director of Client Solutions On meetings: “High signal, no fluff. People are really comfortable with each other, so we move quickly through agenda items, give direct feedback, and leave with a very clear list of next steps. There’s not a lot of posturing or over-formality—everyone is focused on making decisions or unblocking something.” — Daniel Owens, Director of Client Solutions On what kinds of people would be a great fit: “Someone that is comfortable operating in ambiguity, and who wants to run towards problems, solve them quickly and iterate. Someone with a strong sense of ownership, who sets a fast pace for themselves. Someone who is scrappy, flexible, and collaborative. Someone who can roll with the punches. Someone who can operate with earnesty and urgency.” — Multiple people on the Valence team On who would NOT be a good fit: “Anyone focused on ‘strategy’ without willing to get dirty in the execution. Anyone not using AI tools on a regular basis, or getting excited to experiment with new ones.” — Kira Luscher, Director of Growth
If you like “operating from a checklist of best practices,” or if you “need a lot of structure,” I was told, Valence may not be a great fit. But if you are ready to work hard, focus on execution, and collaborate across every team in the company—it may be worth learning more. Valence is ramping up faster than ever after raising their Series B and is currently hiring for a number of roles in New York, London, and Toronto. You can apply via the link on their website, but if you want to try extra hard, you could also try one of the ideas here. Or you could (in addition to an application) simply email the person who’s hiring for your role explaining how you think you might be valuable. You're currently a free subscriber to next play. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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This AI coach just raised $50M and is transforming work at Delta, KraftHeinz, Prudential, and more
Thursday, 13 November 2025
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