Meet Nadia: Valence's AI coach for leadership development and workplace collaboration

In sports, good coaching requires a deep understanding of players, team dynamics, the competition, and the ability to quickly apply that context to fast-moving and complex plays and scenarios. Yet, while we’ve long recognized the importance of coaching for high-performing athletes, we don’t often find the same level of coaching for high-performance work. Scaling effective and consistent coaching across enterprises with global offices and thousands of employees has proven difficult. Even with the rise of online coaching, making workplace coaching accessible beyond the most senior executives at a company has been a challenge. 

AI coaching: a new category of enterprise software – and next generation HR technology 

AI changes the game, making it possible to give every employee the sort of coaching only the C-suite used to receive. But AI coaching isn’t a replacement for human coaching — it’s a net new modality that expands who can access coaching and the consistency and effectiveness of coaching at scale. Nadia also has guardrails customized to each organization to escalate coaching to a human coach, manager, or HR in line with enterprise and organizational HR policies. For enterprises, AI enables the application of complex context, including operations, goals, and culture, to coaching for each individual.  

At Bessemer, we believe AI coaching marks a new category of software that is both a coach for the individual employee and a next-generation HR technology. Legacy HR platforms for talent development, learning, and performance are primed for improvement. Many employees often use them sporadically throughout the year to submit a performance review with little to no impact on actual performance or complete an online learning program that doesn’t actually develop on-the-job skills. 

Simultaneously, AI coaching is a chance to redefine work and reimagine HR for the AI era. When every worker has an AI coach, HR has a new channel for continuous performance management, learning in the flow of work, and a shared cultural fabric for deep alignment around organizational goals and through large-scale changes. This is why we’re thrilled to partner with Valence, the market leader in this emerging category of enterprise AI coaching. 

Meet Nadia: the world’s first and leading enterprise AI coach

Valence was initially founded in 2018, and its first product was a SaaS-based tool for boosting team productivity. When ChatGPT was released, CEO and founder Parker Mitchell, who had worked on small neural nets and precursors to today’s LLM in grad school, recognized that LLMs made it possible to democratize highly effective, personalized AI coaching across the largest enterprises at low marginal cost. The team quickly pivoted and launched Nadia, the first AI coach for work, in early 2023. Soon after, it was piloted at dozens of Fortune 500 companies. 

These pilots typically start in a single, measurable workflow, most commonly performance-review preparation or new-manager coaching, and then expand into adjacent talent workflows, such as conflict resolution, frontline procedure support, and change-management campaigns. Today, Nadia is the most widely used and trusted AI coach for work, and Delta, General Mills, Prudential, Experian, and other of the world’s leading companies have deployed Nadia at scale to address multiple use cases. 

Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) are evangelical about Nadia and have greatly expanded rollouts of the product across their organizations in the past two years. They’ve cited record-high NPS scores, user engagement, and retention for Nadia that surpass any HR tool they’ve used previously, with Nadia making a quantitative impact on manager performance — increasing the productivity of both knowledge and frontline workers, and freeing time for Human Resource Business Partners (HRBPs) to focus on higher-value tasks. 

Why we’re backing Valence and Nadia

Across Bessemer’s portfolio and beyond, a powerful transformation of the enterprise is taking place, sparked by the advent of LLMs — specifically, AI agents. Nadia is one of the most advanced agentic systems deployed at scale today in large enterprises. From inception, Nadia was purpose-built to deliver coaching at scale across the largest and most complex organizations at a fraction of the cost of a human coach. (To date, Nadia has never failed an AI Council review.)

Unlike traditional LLMs that provide generalized guidance or AI tools that serve as simple add-ons to existing coaching programs, Nadia is powered by a proprietary memory-and-context retrieval engine. This allows her to ground coaching conversations in the unique realities of the individual manager, their organization, and established HR best practices. By recalling and applying this context, Nadia moves beyond surface-level advice to deliver support that is both relevant and actionable.

Building on this foundation, Nadia employs an intelligence and hypothesis layer that allows her to form and refine ideas about the most effective guidance over time. This creates a feedback loop in which every conversation enriches her memory, sharpening future insights and deepening personalization. Combined with best-in-class voice AI and seamless integration into platforms like Microsoft Teams, Nadia offers employees a natural, conversational interface. Together, these capabilities position Valence to democratize and elevate modern coaching by uniting LLMs, voice AI, and proprietary contextual intelligence into one cohesive solution. 

This all wouldn’t be possible without the right team to build the coaching platform for the future of work. Founder Parker Mitchell started two non-profits and helped lead Bridgewater’s efforts to systematize management and strengthen its culture. He’s a one-of-a-kind leader who’s been focused on improving the performance of teams at work since 2017, and we’re inspired by his vision for a future of work where AI augments human intelligence and collaboration. Parker is joined by Chief AI Scientist Jeff Dalton, formerly at Google and a leading researcher in conversational AI and information retrieval, as well as Chief Product Officer Noam Mantel, former VP of Product at Slack.

We’re excited to lead Valence’s $50M Series B as the team defines the next generation of HR technology and brings AI coaching to millions of employees across the Fortune 1000. Valence has more than tripled in scale this past year, driven by existing customers rolling out Nadia across their entire organizations and organically adopting many other use cases, as well as an impressive growth in new customers. 

Looking for an AI coach for your entire enterprise? Book a demo with Valence. Or, if you’re looking to transform the future of work with AI, check out roles at Valence.