Rhythms, a startup building a productivity platform powered by large language models, today launched from stealth mode with $26 million in seed funding.

Greenoaks and Madrona Venture Group jointly led the investment. They were joined by Accel, Cercano and Founders’ Co-op.

All five investment firms previously backed Ally Technologies Inc., a productivity startup that Rhymes founder and Chief Executive Officer Vetri Vellore had launched in 2018. Ally developed a software platform designed to help executives measure the success of business initiatives. The company was acquired by Microsoft Corp. in 2021 after raising $76 million and building up a customer base of more than 1,000 organizations.

Rhythms, officially VTVK Inc., is developing a software platform that promises to help enterprises make their employees more productive. The platform uses large language models to collect information about the work patterns of a company’s most successful teams. The language models then makes that information available to the company’s other business units, which can use it to boost productivity.

Rhythms says its platform aggregates data on work patterns such the way a team goes about conducting monthly business reviews and quarterly retrospectives. The platform retrieves that data from a company’s internal applications and files. Moreover, it takes into account the work patterns of the most productive teams at other organizations.

The platform turns the collected data into productivity suggestions that it makes available to users via a chatbot. Besides providing information about the most productive teams’ workflows, the chatbot can also recommend ways of adapting those workflows to the user’s business unit. According to Rhythms, its platform places a particular emphasis on increasing the efficiency with which teams carry out regularly recurring business activities. 

“The rise of AI and the continued popularity of hybrid workplaces are two of the defining trends of our time,” said Vellore (pictured, left, with Madrona managing director S. Somasegar). “These, along with the continued push to achieve more with less, have created an urgent need for all organizations to re-examine how they operate and enhance their organizational productivity.”

Rhythms reportedly plans to make its platform accessible to a limited number of customers early next year with the goal of making it broadly available later in 2024. The company will use a part of its new seed round to support the platform’s rollout. The capital will also enable it to build new features, as well as launch a recruiting push that will see it hire more employees in the U.S. and India. 

Photo: Madrona