Every company in the world is being restructured significantly and quickly around AI. Entire functions are being redefined by what AI can now do for organizations. The best people leaders are now focused on how to use AI to supercharge their people and organizations. This creates a massive opportunity to create the infrastructure that provides the data and insights on optimizing organizational performance. To take advantage of this opportunity, organizations need to actually know what’s happening with their people and eventually AI agents in real time.

This is the structural challenge that drew us to Windmill, and we're thrilled to announce that Inspired Capital led their $8M seed round alongside Founder Collective and others, bringing their total raised to $12M.

Windmill is building the context graph for your people: a continuously updated, cited understanding of the workforce that helps HR and executives lead strategically, gives managers real visibility into their teams, and lets every person's work speak for itself. Most companies have no real system for any of this. The knowledge of who is performing, who is growing, who elevates the people around them lives in the heads of a handful of managers. It's biased, it's incomplete, and it's impossible to act on at scale. The signal exists — it's sitting in Slack threads, pull requests, project docs, and meeting notes — but no one has organized it into something a company can actually use. That's the gap Windmill is closing.

Windmill’s wedge into the market is the performance review, which is a process most companies dread and most employees distrust. Rather than asking people to reconstruct months of work from memory, the platform integrates with Slack, GitHub, Google Workspace, and more than 30 other tools where work already happens. Reviews are completed in roughly 1/10 the time, with 93% employee satisfaction. Early customers raved to us about how magical Windmill has made performance reviews. The company has grown to over 100 customers since launching its performance reviews product in November 2025, including Kalshi, Rho, and The Farmer's Dog.

But performance reviews are just the entry point, not the destination. Underneath them is what Windmill calls the context graph: a living layer of understanding built from the actual evidence of how people work, what they accomplished, what their peers and managers observed, and how that maps to the expectations of their role. That context becomes the foundation for everything people leaders need to do well: calibrations, org design, staffing decisions, and identifying who is ready to lead what comes next.

In addition to the massive opportunity and early customer love, we were drawn to Windmill’s exceptional founding team. Max Shaw, Brian Distelburger, and Mark Tanner built Windmill out of a problem they watched play out firsthand. Max spent more than a decade at Yext, rising to SVP of Product Management and building products at scale in a category most people overlooked until it mattered. Brian co-founded Yext, served as President and COO, and helped take the company from early days to public markets, running global sales, customer success, and operations along the way. Mark brings deep product and strategy experience across organizations at very different stages, including time at Saturn and WeWork, where he worked closely on how companies structure and scale their people operations. The three of them together bring a rare combination of long-term trust and genuinely complementary skills.

The timing reflects a real inflection point. AI is reshaping org structures faster than annual planning cycles can track and is forcing companies to have better real time understanding of their organization. The companies that will operate most effectively are those that understand their people continuously, not through episodic reviews and gut instinct, but through a system that knows what is actually happening. Windmill is building the infrastructure to power organizations in an AI world. 

We're excited to partner with Max, Brian,  Mark and the entire Windmill team as they build the context graph that every modern organization needs.