We are excited to announce Madrona’s investment in Vetri Vellore’s new company, Rhythms, a first-of-its-kind AI-powered operating system. It is a pleasure to co-lead this investment along with Greenoaks. Vetri, who has dedicated his career to developing products that enhance purpose, happiness, and productivity in the workplace, previously built two successful companies in this field.
With recent advancements in AI, Vetri is eager to create a unique category within enterprise software to transform the future of work, distinct from other automation and team operations products, by revolutionizing how organizations work day to day. His ambition is to build an AI-powered operating system that enables every enterprise to achieve best-in-class performance and productivity, and we are thrilled to partner with him on this venture.
Soma has known Vetri for over 25 years, starting when they worked together at Microsoft. Soma followed Vetri’s journey as he built his first company, Chronus, and later, Madrona invested in Vetri’s second company, Ally, which Microsoft acquired in 2021. Over the years, we at Madrona have developed a deep respect and admiration for Vetri as a customer-oriented founder and brilliant technologist. We’ve been impressed with Vetri’s growth as a leader and CEO who exhibits operational excellence and a strong founder-market fit. We believe that Vetri and his team will revolutionize team management and productivity, enabling employees within enterprises to have more rewarding work experiences.
In the past year, many companies have prioritized efficient growth over growing at any cost. Yet, numerous business leaders face the challenge of increasing revenue despite having a smaller team. A McKinsey analysis of nearly 500 B2B companies across industries found that the top 25% of performers generate a higher gross margin than the bottom 25% for every dollar invested in sales. As such, executives are continually seeking ways to enhance the productivity of their teams. Large enterprises employ teams of data analysts to improve internal productivity, but many companies lack a system to accurately analyze the habits and rhythms of high-performance teams and to provide personalized, measured recommendations for productivity enhancement.
Additionally, changes in employee working behaviors, frequent turnover at companies, and shifting collaboration practices within organizations have created a need for an AI-powered operating system capable of orchestrating efficiency and serving as a repository for operating knowledge. Often, there is a disconnect in prioritization among executive, operating, and cross-functional teams. This misalignment can be traced to factors such as remote/hybrid work, team reorganization, and the proliferation of SaaS (siloed data and information). These factors have created a need for a product that analyzes team dynamics and provides structured, personalized recommendations to improve individual habits across the team.
At Rhythms, Vetri and his team are building a product that addresses team efficiency and new work dynamics. The product facilitates top-to-bottom workflows that break down various team rhythms and habits. A “rhythm” refers to a recurring activity that teams engage in at different intervals to achieve or improve outcomes, including monthly business reviews, quarterly retrospectives, and weekly cross-functional meetings. This solution helps organizations understand, streamline, and improve their “rhythms” or ways of working, with the goal of understanding the behavior of each individual and team within a company to provide clear ROIs and recommended practices that teams can adopt to achieve company goals.
The company uses LLMs to extract data and semantics from enterprise applications and documents and to “fine-tune” its assistant, enabling it to converse in the lexicon of any business. Generative AI is essential for this use case — without it, it would be nearly impossible to analyze information across diverse applications and document sources to detect reoccurring habits of top-performing teams within an organization and enable every team in an organization to personalize and adopt them.
Madrona looks forward to partnering with Vetri on his mission to develop the AI-powered operating system for high-performing teams. We have been investing in intelligent application companies for over a decade, including recent investments in Typeface, RunwayML, and Deepgram, and we could not be more excited to partner with Vetri and his team as they build an industry-defining company for team productivity.