Halifax-based SaaS startup Innerlogic has closed $1.3 million in seed financing as it looks to leverage its founders’ two decades of Olympic team-building experience to transform company culture with artificial intelligence (AI).
The funding round was led by Halifax-based Concrete Ventures, with participation from Tidal Venture Partners, Techstars, and Toronto-based Middle Cove Capital.
“The key principles and strategies of building high-performance teams are universal.”
Innerlogic traces its origins back to when its co-founders, CEO Bryce Tully and president and COO Mike Bawol, worked for Team Canada at four different Olympic Games events. Both spent their tenures helping Olympic teams reach the podium, Tully as a mental performance consultant and Bawol as a performance data analyst.
The duo wanted to take their learnings on team-building to the corporate world, founding Innerlogic in 2020 with a goal of creating a platform that accelerates companies’ path to what it calls “high-performance culture.”
“While a locker room at the Olympics may seem like a stark contrast to a corporate boardroom, the key principles and strategies of building high-performance teams are universal and pervasive,” Tully said in a statement.
Many companies collect data from their employees through surveys. However, according to Innerlogic, many businesses struggle to derive value from that data. The startup notes on its website that too often, people operations and human resources data from surveys vanish into a black box.
Innerlogic’s platform provides businesses with analysis and reporting, behaviour-based coaching actions, and company alignment and accountability mechanisms. The startup says it uses AI to tailor its content for each company based on its own people operations data, so startups can immediately begin implementing changes to improve their culture.
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According to Entrevestor, Innerlogic currently has 40 clients, equally shared between sports teams and businesses. Tully told Entrevestor the startup used sports teams as an entry into the market given the founders’ experience but is principally targeting businesses with between 500 and 5,000 employees.
Innerlogic recently completed the spring 2024 cohort of Techstars Boston, participating in the accelerator’s demo day in May. With its new funding, the startup plans to scale its sales and marketing division, go-to-market efforts, and product development. Innerlogic said it recently hired a growth consultancy to assist with these initiatives.
“We’ve seen how culture can make or break a company,” Concrete Ventures general partner Patrick Hankinson said in a statement. “We are blown away by the team’s technical knowledge and their innovative incorporation of AI to address this massive challenge and opportunity to high-performance culture.”
Feature image courtesy Innerlogic.