People are the most important asset of any company. And yet how many companies do you know where employees are truly happy? Where they feel they’re being developed and mentored to their fullest potential? Where they feel their personal and professional goals align with the company’s mission? I bet not many.

Identifying and hiring great talent is one of the hardest and most important parts of building a company and setting it up for success. While finding great talent is hard enough as it is, retention is even harder. We live in the age of LinkedIn and Glassdoor. The best performing companies and CEOs know this — your best employees are constantly being courted by recruiters and competitors, and if you drop the ball on talent management, you drop everything. This problem becomes even more acute when you factor in a new generation of millennials entering the workforce, who expect to be treated with more transparency and equity than any generation before them.

Talent management. Why is it so hard? And what’s the solution? Enter Rajeev Behera and Reflektive. From the first time I met Rajeev in late 2014, I was impressed with his vision for a modern talent management platform. In his previous role as a product exec at Playdom (also a Lightspeed company), Rajeev scaled his team from 0 to 100 employees and realized quickly that the existing range of HR solutions were outdated, hard to use and did not actually help with talent management, rather they helped with HR processmanagement. In particular, Rajeev felt that the current state of employee feedback in the form of an annual performance review resulted in employee frustration, and a disconnect from the company and the team. So when it was time for him to move on from Playdom, he decided to build a talent management solution that would truly be helpful to employees and companies alike. And Reflektive was born.

Rajeev’s core thesis with Reflektive is three-fold:

1. Talent management and development is one of the most core functions leaders at companies undertake. Great employees have multiple job opportunities, so they optimize not for monetary rewards, but a sense of purpose and career growth.
2. Talent development should not be a once a year process; it should be continuous in nature and be more than a one-way manager-to-employee feedback. It should be part of a company’s culture and DNA, rather than merely a process.
3. In order to have continuous talent development at scale, companies need to deploy technology that removes all friction from such communications.

Accordingly, Rajeev and his team at Reflektive built a beautiful solution that offers a frictionless way for employees to give and receive feedback from their colleagues, and manage their individual goals. Reflektive started as a continuous peer feedback application, but over the last year and a half they’ve built out a comprehensive solution that includes periodic performance reviews, goals management and employee surveys.

At Lightspeed, we have always believed that talent is one of the most critical ingredients of success for any organization. So when Rajeev shared his vision with us last year, we knew we wanted to partner with him. And today, we’re thrilled to announce our Series A investment in Reflektive.We’re not the only ones who are excited about what Rajeev and the team at Reflektive are building. Reflektive, while still young, already has been adopted by some of the largest and fastest growing enterprises such as Pinterest, Twilio, SquareTrade, Thumbtack, Glassdoor, Quantcast, UltraGenyx, AltSchool, and Flatiron Health amongst others.

The long term vision doesn’t stop here. Rajeev ultimately wants to build an end-to-end talent management solution that enables CEOs and team leaders to empower, communicate with and mentor their employees. We’re excited to see what Rajeev and the team at Reflektive build over the coming years.