This new ‘business performance OS’ startup uses AI to manage productivity, automate reporting – GeekWire

Chris Pitchford, a Seattle tech veteran who previously co-founded Shyft and was vice president of sales at Ally, is leading a new startup called Brev that leverages large language models to help companies manage reporting and analysis of their business performance.

Founded earlier this year, Brev pitches its software as a “business performance OS.” It crunches internal data from various sources and streamlines the creation of progress reports for metrics such as annual recurring revenue, sales forecasts, customer success, and more.

The idea is to reduce prep work for meetings or reviews, or even eliminate meetings altogether.

Brev also pulls insights from unstructured data on company metrics, helps automate meeting workflows, and manages goal-setting.

The company takes advantage of Pitchford’s prior experience at Ally, a Seattle startup that helped companies monitor their Objectives and Key Results (OKR), a popular framework for running teams and businesses. Microsoft acquired Ally in 2021.

Pitchford said Brev differentiates from competitors with its “LLM-native approach to business performance management,” and by connecting to the goals and strategy of an organization.

“The legacy strategy execution and performance management players are still around and serve a purpose,” he said via email. “But we believe the future of this space lies in harnessing the power of AI in a much deeper way.”

Pitchford, who also co-founded a worker shift software platform called Shyft, spent a year at Microsoft after the Ally acquisition and then was chief revenue officer at governance platform VComply for less than a year.

Pitchford co-founded Brev with Vic Hu, a former engineering manager at Indeed who also worked at Meta, Iterative Health, and Panopto. The company’s founding engineer is Benn Graham.

Pitchford recently relocated to San Francisco to stay close to the company’s customers, he said. Hu is based in Seattle.

Brev is bootstrapped and has not raised outside funding.

Ally founder Vetri Vellore last year launched a Seattle-area startup called Rhythms that uses AI to help companies improve their productivity.