Windmill, a New York startup, has raised $12 million in seed funding to build AI tools that help companies better understand and manage their people. The company was co-founded by Max Shaw, Brian Distelburger, and Mark Tanner. While most AI companies are focused on automating work or cutting costs, Windmill is building technology to help organizations track, develop, and keep the employees they already have.

Most companies have no reliable system for understanding their own workforce. Who is doing good work, who is stuck, which teams are effective and why — that kind of knowledge usually sits in the heads of a few senior managers, nowhere else. As AI takes over more routine tasks and flattens organizational layers, the cost of making bad decisions about people keeps rising. According to SHRM’s 2026 State of AI in HR report, which surveyed 1,908 HR professionals in December 2025, 62% of organizations were already using AI somewhere in their operations, yet most still lack the basic people data needed to act on it strategically. Windmill is building the infrastructure to fill that gap.

The $12 million seed round was led by Inspired Capital, with participation from Primary Venture Partners, Founder Collective, and Oceans Ventures. Since launching its performance reviews product in November 2025, the company has grown to more than 100 customers, including Kalshi, Rho, and Merge.

Why Companies Are Flying Blind on Their Own People

Organizations invest heavily in tracking their finances, their customers, and their code. Tracking their people is another matter. Information about who is growing, who is struggling, and who makes the teams around them better is typically scattered across Slack messages, manager notes, and memory. Decisions about hiring, promotion, and team structure end up depending on whoever happens to remember the most.

“I’ve had upwards of 10,000 people come through companies I’ve run,” said Brian Distelburger, co-founder at Windmill. “Talk to any executive and they’ll talk about how important people are. When you drill down a few levels into what they’re doing to make sure they have the right people, in the right roles, working on the right things, there’s not much depth there.”

Brian Distelburger, co-founder at Windmill

This problem is getting harder to ignore. As AI tools compress management layers and push employees into more complex, judgment-intensive work, the value of understanding each person clearly goes up. The global HR technology market was valued at $43.66 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $95.95 billion by 2034, according to Fortune Business Insights, with much of that growth concentrated in analytics and AI-oriented tools. Most of those tools, however, depend on structured people data that the majority of organizations have never built.

How Windmill’s Context Graph Works

Windmill has not outlined a specific breakdown of how the new capital will be spent, but its product direction is clear. The company plans to expand what it calls the context graph well beyond performance reviews, building a continuously updated picture of the workforce that managers, HR teams, and AI agents can all draw from.

The platform connects with Slack, GitHub, Google Workspace, and more than 30 other tools where work already happens day to day. Rather than asking employees to write self-assessments from scratch, it draws on existing activity — a pull request, a Slack thread, a design document — and builds a cited, evidence-based record of each person and team. Windmill reports that its reviews are completed 90% faster than traditional processes, with a 93% employee satisfaction rate.

“At most companies, the most important context about work and people isn’t captured in one place,” said Max Shaw, CEO and co-founder at Windmill. “It’s scattered across apps, notes, conversations, and in the minds of managers. That makes important decisions about people far too dependent on memory and intuition alone. And if you want agents anywhere near those decisions, you first need a systematic way to organize the underlying context. We’re building that layer.”

Max Shaw, CEO and co-founder at Windmill

Windmill: Founders, Product, and Early Traction

Windmill was founded by Shaw, Distelburger, and Mark Tanner, all based in New York City. The company launched its first product, an AI-driven performance review system, in November 2025 and reached more than 100 customers within months.

The product is organized around four layers of workforce information: People, Evidence, Expectations, and Perspectives.

Each data point is tied to a specific source, whether a pull request, a documented standard, or a peer comment. That traceability is central to how Windmill positions its system — not just as a reporting tool, but as an auditable record companies can rely on when making decisions about their people.

The context graph is available through Windy, Windmill’s AI agent, as well as through the web app and full MCP and API support, meaning companies can access it inside their existing workflows.

The Investors Behind the Round

Inspired Capital led the $12 million seed round, with Primary Venture Partners, Founder Collective, and Oceans Ventures participating. This appears to be the company’s first disclosed funding round.

“Every headline right now is about AI replacing workers. We think that’s the wrong bet. The best organizations of the next decade won’t be the ones that eliminate the most headcount. They’ll be the ones that use AI to build workforces that are continuously supported and developed. Doing so requires new infrastructure, and that’s exactly what Windmill is building. Max, Brian, and Mark have the conviction and the depth to go after this problem the right way, and we’re proud to be on the journey with them.”

Alexa von Tobel, Managing Partner, Inspired Capital

Origianl Creator: Ekaterina Pisareva
Original Link: https://justainews.com/companies/funding-news/windmill-secures-12m-to-fix-how-companies-track-people/
Originally Posted: Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:45:14 +0000