Great leaders aren’t born—they’re made. But for too long, leadership development has been slow, expensive, and disconnected from the realities of day-to-day work and how adults learn. It’s time for a change. Today, we’re excited to share that we’ve raised a $2.5M Seed round led by eLab Ventures to fundamentally transform this industry.
Today, we’re excited to share that we’ve raised a $2.5M Seed round led by eLab Ventures, with participation from Incisive VC, 57 Blocks, Sher Ventures, Sarah Smith Fund, Embedding VC, Jolly VC, Gaingels, Alchemist Accelerator, StartX, Cooley LLC, and Mastodon Capital, with support from experienced angels and advisors like Sagar Mehta (CTO@OpenTable), Jia Li (ex-Chief AI Fellow@Accenture, ex-founder of Google Cloud AI/ML's New Products Division), Melinda Wolfe (3x CHRO@Bloomberg, Pearson, GLG), and Jason Rosoff (CEO@Radical Candor).
AI assistants have revolutionized nearly every business function—from sales and marketing to customer service and engineering—yet leadership development and HR have remained largely untouched by this transformation, until now.
With our AI coach Pascal, we're redefining coaching to truly unlock performance. We’re not just replicating human executive coaching with AI, but taking it much further: a workplace companion that provides continuous, contextual guidance within your daily workflow, based on your actual communication patterns and meetings. The result isn't sporadic every-other-week conversations—it's development woven into the fabric of work itself, available precisely when leaders need it most.
Your sales teams likely already use Gong, Chorus, or other sales coaching tools offering real-time guidance to improve their external calls. Pascal offers parallel capabilities for managers and teams to improve their internal collaboration and team effectiveness.
The idea for Pinnacle started not in a boardroom but in the field. Over the past 15 years, our founder’s work spanned community development in Brazilian favelas, running a Kenyan accelerator, and executive coaching for growth-stage founders & C-suite execs across the globe. Across all of these experiences, one insight stood out: people thrive when they have the right support at the right moment. Yet in fast-moving startups and growing companies, that support often isn’t available—until now.
Our lead investor Bob Stefanski, Co-Founder & Managing Director at eLab Ventures, shares his excitement about what we've built:
“When it comes to AI-enabled applications, Pinnacle's differentiation is clear. They've demonstrated a deep understanding of the coaching domain, applying AI in a truly unique way. What sets them apart is their focus on leveraging proprietary data and frameworks to train their models. This data advantage allows them to offer a coaching experience that's not only personalized but delivers unique, actionable insights that others simply can't replicate. It's this specific blend of domain expertise and data-driven innovation that makes Pinnacle a compelling investment for eLab."
While ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) provide broad, general answers, Pascal is different. Pascal taps into your workplace ecosystem—accessing everything from an employee’s performance reviews, 360 feedback, and career aspirations to a company’s competency frameworks, values, and training materials—to provide coaching that's deeply informed by your employees' actual work relationships and challenges. Soon, Pascal will also access communication data (Zoom, Slack, Teams, etc.) to offer even more personalized and contextualized guidance.
Pascal serves as a trusted ally, seamlessly integrating coaching into managers' daily routines to drive performance by assisting them to:
Sarah Smith, Founder & Managing Partner of Sarah Smith Fund, sees this as a game-changer:.
“ I’ve seen the continual appetite for personalized coaching and development of people managers. In the increasingly remote and hybrid environment, manager development is even more critical. Alexei and team have deep domain expertise in coaching and AI for HR, and are committed to building a product that is in the flow of a manager’s day, and are focused on creating measurable behavior change.”
People teams are under increasing pressure to develop leaders at scale without losing the human touch. Pascal extends their reach by delivering consistent, contextual coaching across the organization and surfacing hidden insights about organizational patterns, freeing HR professionals to focus on strategic initiatives and moments that matter most.
Pascal serves as the front line of your HR team, supporting your employee base 24/7 across many more settings than your team could ever find time for. Imagine improving performance on autopilot, saving you time in the process by resolving issues early and escalating just the most sensitive cases to HR.
Melinda Wolfe, former CHRO at Bloomberg, GLG, and Pearson, puts it this way:
"HR leaders today are under more pressure than ever to drive business impact while staying deeply human. Pinnacle gives them a powerful tool to elevate their influence, develop talent, and ensure AI augments—not replaces—the human touch in HR."
With our recent funding, we're expanding Pascal's capabilities to deliver coaching at the moments it matters most. This investment accelerates functionality for Pascal to accompany teams throughout their day, joining virtual meetings and providing real-time leadership guidance based on actual communication patterns, public Slack/Teams data, and calendar information. This investment also accelerates Pascal's partnership with the People team, unlocking anonymized insights so you know how to be most strategic with your time.
If you’re building a culture of great management, we’d love to show you how Pinnacle can help.
