Inspired Team
Why We Invested: Windmill
Short summary: Inspired Capital led Windmill’s $8 million seed round, bringing the company’s total funding to $12 million. Windmill is building a continuously updated, cited understanding of a company’s workforce, beginning with AI-assisted performance reviews. We believe that understanding can become important infrastructure for people leaders as AI changes how organizations work. [1]
AI is prompting companies to rethink how their teams work, how functions are organized, and where people can create the most value. People leaders are increasingly being asked to help their organizations navigate those changes, creating an opportunity for infrastructure that provides better data and insights into organizational performance.
To take advantage of that opportunity, organizations need to understand what is happening with their people and, eventually, the AI agents working alongside them. That is the structural challenge that drew us to Windmill.
Inspired Capital led Windmill’s $8 million seed round alongside Founder Collective and others, bringing its total funding to $12 million. We are excited to partner with a team building the context that people leaders need to make better-informed decisions. [1]
What Windmill Is Building
Windmill is building what it calls the context graph for your people: a continuously updated, cited understanding of the workforce that helps HR and executives lead strategically, gives managers visibility into their teams, and lets each person’s work speak for itself. [1] [2]
In many organizations, knowledge of who is performing, who is growing, and who helps the people around them succeed lives in the heads of individual managers. That understanding can be incomplete, shaped by bias, and difficult to use consistently across an organization.
The underlying evidence often already exists in Slack threads, pull requests, project documents, and meeting notes. The challenge is connecting it to the people involved, the expectations of their roles, and the observations of colleagues who understand the work.
Windmill’s approach organizes that context around people, evidence, expectations, and perspectives. We believe this creates a foundation for decisions that would otherwise depend heavily on memory and fragmented information. [2]
Why Performance Reviews Are the Starting Point
Windmill’s entry point is the performance review, a process that often asks employees and managers to reconstruct months of work from memory. Important contributions can be hard to recall, particularly when the work happened across teams or outside a manager’s direct view.
The platform integrates with Slack, GitHub, Google Workspace, and more than 30 other tools where work already happens. It uses that context to support review preparation, so employees and managers can begin with evidence rather than a blank page. [1] [2]
In its funding announcement, Windmill reported that reviews were completed approximately 90% faster, or in roughly one-tenth of the time, with 93% employee satisfaction. The announcement also reported more than 100 customers since the performance review product launched in November 2025. [2]
Our investment announcement highlighted customers including Kalshi, Rho, and The Farmer’s Dog. Early customers spoke enthusiastically to us about the experience Windmill had created, reinforcing our interest in a product addressing a familiar and consequential organizational problem. [1]
The Opportunity Beyond Performance Reviews
Performance reviews are the entry point to a broader opportunity. Underneath the review is a living layer of context about what people worked on, what they accomplished, what peers and managers observed, and how that work maps to the expectations of their role.
We believe that context can support the work people leaders need to do throughout the year, including performance calibration, organizational design, staffing decisions, and identifying who may be ready for a new responsibility. These decisions become more useful when leaders can see the evidence behind them.
The investment thesis is therefore about more than completing an existing process faster. It is about giving organizations a more continuous understanding of their people as responsibilities, teams, and business priorities change.
Why We Backed the Founding Team
Alongside the opportunity and early customer enthusiasm, we were drawn to Windmill’s founding team. Max Shaw, Brian Distelburger, and Mark Tanner built the company around a problem they had seen firsthand, bringing experience across product development, company building, and organizational growth. [1]
Max spent more than a decade at Yext, rising to SVP of Product Management and building products at scale. Brian co-founded Yext, served as President and COO, and helped take the company from its early days to public markets, with responsibilities spanning global sales, customer success, and operations. [1]
Mark brings product and strategy experience from organizations at different stages, including Saturn and WeWork, where he worked closely on how companies structure and scale their people operations. Together, the founders bring long-term trust and complementary skills to the challenge Windmill is addressing. [1]
Why This Moment Matters
As AI changes how work gets done, we believe companies will need to revisit their organizational decisions more frequently than an annual planning cycle allows. Understanding who has the relevant experience, how teams collaborate, and where responsibilities are changing becomes increasingly important.
Windmill is building toward a system that helps organizations maintain that understanding over time. For us, the opportunity is to give people leaders a stronger foundation for decisions as the relationship between human work and AI continues to evolve.
We are excited to partner with Max, Brian, Mark, and the entire Windmill team as they build the context graph for modern organizations.
Sources
[1] Inspired Capital - Why We Invested: Windmill
[2] Windmill - Funding announcement and product overview