The Southeast region has become a hub for Future of Work startups. Many venture-backed teams, like ImIn, Illoominus, and Clovers, want to make it easier to hire and run effective organizations in a hybrid-centric world. And now with a new name and a new round of seed funding, Opre wants to help managers write better, more informative performance reviews for their teams.
The Nashville-based startup, previously called Teaming, is a workplace AI startup. Think of it as an “easy button” for writing performance reviews. The goal is to bring an AI-powered coach into a manager’s daily work.
“A coach can’t be there with you all the time. They’re not in your meetings. They’re not doing your work with you late at night. They don’t have the full context of you and your performance at work,” Nashville entrepreneur Kate O’Neil told Hypepotamus. But Opre’s AI platform certainly can get that full context.
This not only helps managers deliver better feedback, but it also helps employees get a holistic understanding of what they need to grow in their roles.
Opre doesn’t just rely on information gathered from one meeting. It takes into consideration an individual’s goals, work style, and communication style to look for opportunities for potential improvement. This can help ensure a manager is delivering the most effective feedback for each direct report without spending hours preparing or writing a review.
The startup utilizes OpenAI alongside proprietary tools that empower its coaching techniques.
It is really a Future of Work play, O’Neil explained.
“We envision a future where Opre is your work AI. It knows your skills, your interests, and where you want to go with your career. Then we help guide and coach you to deliver the best work that only you can do…and fit those puzzle pieces together with your team members, with your managers, and within the context of your company,” she told Hypepotamus. “It’s about showing how investing in your people increases performance.”
AI Funding In Nashville
Opre recently closed a $3.8 million seed round, news confirmed by the publication TENNBEAT last week.
Oregon-based Cascade Seed Fund led the round. Many other angel investors, including many from across Tennessee, also joined the round.
While Opre’s lead investor is from the West Coast, Nashville still played an important role in helping the startup secure its seed funding. O’Neil reconnected with Opre’s lead investing team at 3686, Tennessee’s entrepreneurial conference.
The funding will help grow the platform’s security and compliance work. It will also help the team build out new integrations that are needed to ensure Opre is ready to take on bigger enterprise clients.
Get To Know The Team
Opre’s executive team members are no strangers to building products together. O’Neil, Tim Mulron, and Stephen Franklin worked together at Tennessee-based LeanKit, a Trello-like enterprise SaaS platform that was acquired by Planview in 2017. O’Neil was previously Director of Revenue Marketing and Product Marketing at Atlanta-based Salesfusion (acquired by SugarCRM). Before Opre, O’Neil served as the Vice President of Marketing for LeanKit. Mulron served as LeanKit’s Chief Revenue Officer and later as co-CEO, and Franklin was LeanKit’s co-founder and CIO.
It was their time together building LeanKit that helped inform the creation of Opre.
“The promise of our software back then was to help managers deliver work faster. And we were focusing 100% on the work, we weren’t touching the biggest thing that increases our capacity to do work…If a team had low morale, our workflow management process software was not going to do anything to improve that situation.”
