Empowering the Human + AI Era: Valence’s Next Chapter

Today marks a defining moment for Valence, and for the vision that inspired us from day one: to build a world where potential is valued more than credential, and where every employee has access to the kind of personalized coaching once reserved for a privileged few.

We’re thrilled and proud to announce our Series B, a $50 million investment, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, who share our conviction that we’re on the cusp of something new and transformative.

While we began with the mission of democratizing coaching, we are at a moment of inflection, as we've realized there is more at stake than this founding purpose.

We believe we're on the cusp of the most profound change in work that any generation has experienced. Work itself is built on language: we think in it, collaborate through it, and express our humanity with it. Generative AI is language AI. It touches the very core of how work gets done, and it will transform every job – the question is how.

I believe our legacy as leaders, especially CHROs, will be most defined by a single question: How did we prepare our workforces to navigate the Human + AI era?

AI will be able to automate much of what we do at work, but if companies only chase automation, they risk weakening the social contract with their employees. AI that enables augmentation — putting helpful AI in the hands of your employees, to help expand human capability, creativity, and performance — is what we need to also get right. 

We believe AI coaching is a big part of how we do that. We built our AI coach Nadia not only to give every employee a world-class coach but also to offer every organization a powerful AI-driven way to manage talent and performance in this new Human + AI Era.

We are excited to share about what we’ve learned so far, and what’s next.

What we learned from one million conversations

Nadia has had more than one million coaching conversations with employees at all levels, from frontline workers to senior executives. With each conversation, we learn more about what employees most want from an AI coach, and that’s led to two big lessons. 

First, people don’t just come to Nadia for a weekly check-in or to learn a new skill – they come when they have a real issue and need help right then, right there.  

• When goals feel daunting, they use Nadia to turn overwhelm into a plan they can start today.
• Before difficult feedback, they rehearse the conversation and anticipate reactions.
• When there is friction with a colleague, they explore root causes, reframe, and practice next steps.
• Ahead of critical meetings, they clarify intent, tighten messages, and better align stakeholders.

And that leads to the second lesson, when every employee at a company uses an AI coach, it can become far more than a coach, it can become a superpower for leveling up talent and performance.

A new way to transform talent and performance at scale

For decades, “talent management” software has emphasized management more than talent. But an AI coach deployed at scale becomes a new and better way to return to the purpose of the work and to make our systems better, faster, and more fair.

We’ve now deployed Nadia at 50+ of the world’s largest companies, and no two companies are alike. Each has its own culture, values, mission, vision, and dynamics, but the shared challenge is aligning employees globally around these. When we embed those into Nadia, she becomes an extension of the best managers and HR leaders at a company, able to give advice fit to the individual worker and aligned to the company. 

In the past 6 months 17 of our first 20 customers doubled down on Nadia, expanding beyond pilots and investing in her as a core part of their talent systems. 

• Experian redesigned its goal-setting process with Nadia’s help, moving from vague, inconsistent goals to clear, measurable ones aligned with strategy .
• Delta Air Lines cut review prep time by 90% while improving consistency across thousands of managers .
• VML uses Nadia to embed clarity and accountability into client-facing teams .
• Prudential expanded its strong coaching culture company-wide with Nadia .

A world-class coach in everyone’s hands

Two and a half years ago, when we began developing Nadia, the idea of AI coaching was met with some skepticism. Now, there’s a growing belief that in a few short years, each of us will have a personalized, bespoke AI coach for work. 

Building Nadia has been thrilling; AI opens up a whole new world of what a “world class coach” will mean. And it’s fundamentally about context — not about asking AI the right question, but ensuring AI has the right context. 

Work runs on relationships and that’s in Nadia’s DNA. She trained to focus on the relationships that drive collaboration. Unlike a human coach who only hears the fragments you share, Nadia can weave patterns across interactions and bring the right organizational context to bear, meeting you not just as an individual, but as a teammate, collaborator, and leader—a human in relationship with other humans. 

She helps you think through what different people need and care about, where the friction sits, how to approach the next conversation, and offers guidance grounded in what she knows about those relationships. That can mean a two-line message to unblock a peer, a clearer agenda for a 1:1, or a tighter email that gets a decision.

Many models can now hold coach-like conversations and give decent advice. Nadia does something else: she keeps a working theory of you, tests it over time, and notices threads across interactions. 

Between sessions, Nadia keeps working. A planning engine runs in the background: lining up a draft you’ll need tomorrow, placing a check-in when it will actually help, surfacing a reflection right as your day ends. If your calendar shows a tough 1:1, she prepares a brief tonight; if a commitment is slipping, she nudges and tracks whether the loop closes.

Nadia fits where you work and builds a practical picture: your role, goals, stakeholders, and patterns. The guidance she suggests for a new analyst won’t look like the plan she writes for a senior PM. Same coach, different playbook, because your context is different.

Join us on the journey

In a memo that sparked conversations in boardrooms across the world, one of our new investors, Shopify founder Tobi Lütke, shared an analogy that captures this moment. In talking about AI, he described a mountain in the distance and fog in the valley. The destination — the mission — is ever clearer, but the path will have to be discovered step by step through the fog.

That is exactly how we see the journey. The path won’t be linear. There will be detours and discoveries. But the destination is unmistakable: a world where every employee, in every role, has access to a world-class coach in their pocket. A future where coaching isn’t a privilege, but a foundation of how people grow, collaborate, and thrive at work.

Alongside us on this journey is an incredible team. In addition to Bessemer, we have added new AI-focused investors, including Tobi Lütke and Scott Belsky, one of the most thoughtful AI leaders and investors of our time. We continue our partnership with Insight Partners, who led our last round of funding and doubled down again on our mission. We’ve also formalized an advisory board of AI and business leaders to help guide us.

If the question that will define your legacy is how well did you prepare your workforce to navigate the Human + AI era? How well we help you answer it will be ours. 

PS. We’re hiring across product, go-to-market, and operational roles. Come help us build the future of coaching, work, and leadership. Explore careers at Valence.

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