Seattle technology veteran Vetri Vellore has launched a new startup called Rhythms, securing a massive $26 million seed round to support his vision of boosting enterprise productivity via AI. The funding was co-led by Madrona Venture Group and Greenoaks, who previously backed Vellore’s prior venture Ally.IO, acquired by Microsoft in 2021.
Rhythms aims to analyze a company’s workflows, meetings, and processes to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities compared to best practices. It then provides intelligent recommendations to enhance team effectiveness, collaboration, and output.
The platform connects into existing systems and applies recent AI breakthroughs in language model understanding to evaluate workflow “rhythms.” The goal is answering why some internal teams thrive over others and sharing cross-organizational learnings to lift performance.
Vellore has spent decades building employee efficiency tools, including former startups Ally and Chronus. He calls Rhythms the “holy grail” of productivity, culminating that experience. It launches amidst a climate of budget cuts but demand for the same or more output. Hybrid policies also often silo data across software tools, issues Rhythms aims to reconcile intelligently.
Rhythms will complement rather than compete with the Microsoft 365 suite leveraging Vellore’s partnerships. It also promises stringent privacy standards analyzing team versus individual employee metrics. Launching initially in preview later this year, Rhythms already has a Seattle and India staff of 5 but will expand significantly with the new capital injection.
The founding team reunites Vellore with Ally and Chronus alumni, while investor Soma Somasegar of Madrona expects Rhythms to pioneer a wholly new enterprise category. That potential likely tempted backers who have seen Vellore build multi-million dollar startups in this productivity space twice already. If Rhythms achieves similar exit success, Seattle may birth another AI unicorn in coming years courtesy of Vetri Vellore.