Rising Team is a Palo Alto–based SaaS company that builds guided team-development software and an AI-powered leadership coach to help managers run interactive workshops, increase engagement, and improve retention across remote, hybrid, and frontline teams.[1][4]
High-Level Overview
- Rising Team’s mission is to help every manager and team build stronger connection, engagement, and leadership skills so people can do their best work and stay longer at their organizations.[6][1]
- Product and focus: Rising Team sells a platform of “Kits” — software-guided, research-informed team workshops plus personalized AI coaching and manager training — designed to scale team development without external facilitators.[1][3]
- Who it serves: customers range from Fortune 500 technology teams to school districts, government agencies, and frontline hourly workers; the product is positioned for managers at all levels as well as organizations that want scalable people-development.[5][1]
- Problem solved: the platform addresses weak team cohesion, inconsistent manager capability, and costly reliance on expensive coaches/offsites by delivering repeatable, measurable team workshops and manager enablement at a fraction of offsite or coach costs.[1][3]
- Growth momentum: Rising Team raised a $3M seed round in 2021 and expanded product offerings (including Mini Kits and Jumbo Kits) and later completed a Series A and introduced a personalized AI leadership coach after additional funding rounds, demonstrating product evolution and commercial traction.[3][5][4]
Origin Story
- Founding and founder background: Rising Team was founded in 2020 by Jennifer Dulski, a seasoned leader who previously served as president and COO of Change.org and has decades of leadership experience informing the product’s content and design.[2][5]
- How the idea emerged: Dulski built the product from experiences leading teams and noticing a gap between pulse/survey tools and one-on-one coaching—she aimed to combine interactive training, assessments, and facilitation into a single platform managers could use themselves.[3][5]
- Early traction and pivots: early versions focused on one-on-one manager tools, then pivoted to team-guided workshops after customer feedback; the company ran longer pilot engagements (12‑month pilots) to generate statistically significant ROI data and expanded into short “Mini Kits” for frontline workers and large-group “Jumbo Kits.”[5][3]
Core Differentiators
- Research + practitioner content: Kits are grounded in academic and applied research on drivers of team success (e.g., psychological safety, appreciation, clear expectations) and built with leadership experts including Jennifer Dulski and external specialists.[1][1]
- Guided workshop software: the platform bundles everything managers need to run an interactive session (training, warmups, activities, timers, data summaries, action items) so teams can run facilitated experiences without an outside facilitator.[1][3]
- Product breadth and formats: offers Development Kits, Connection Kits, Mini Kits (10–15 minute mobile-friendly sessions for frontline teams), and Jumbo Kits for up to 1,000 participants to serve diverse customer needs and settings.[2][5]
- Bottom-up distribution + enterprise scalability: pricing and product design allow individual managers to adopt the tool directly while also enabling organization-wide pilots and year-long deployments to prove ROI at scale.[3][5]
- AI personalization and analytics: the company has layered in AI coaching and data-driven recommendations to personalize leadership development and surface actionable insights for managers and teams.[4][1]
Role in the Broader Tech Landscape
- Trend alignment: Rising Team sits at the intersection of HRtech, people analytics, and AI-enabled learning—riding long-term trends toward distributed work, manager-led development, and software that replaces costly in-person interventions.[1][3]
- Timing: employers are increasingly focused on retention, psychological safety, and scalable manager enablement as distributed and hybrid work models persist, creating demand for tools that measurably improve team performance.[5][1]
- Market forces in their favor: rising investments in employee experience, demand for measurable outcomes (engagement, retention, manager effectiveness), and the need to extend development to frontline hourly workers expand the addressable market.[5][4]
- Ecosystem influence: by packaging facilitation and coaching into repeatable Kits and enabling managers to run their own sessions, Rising Team lowers the barrier for companies to operationalize people development and creates a community of practice among managers.[3][5]
Quick Take & Future Outlook
- Near-term trajectory: expect continued product expansion (deeper AI personalization, analytics, and more kit types), broader adoption across non-tech frontline industries via Mini Kits, and growth in enterprise deployments as the company converts pilot data into enterprise contracts.[4][5]
- Risks and considerations: success depends on proving measurable ROI at scale, maintaining content quality across many use cases, and differentiating from both legacy providers (coaching/offsites) and emerging AI-enabled people-development startups.[5][3]
- Long-term potential: if Rising Team sustains evidence-based outcomes and embeds AI-driven, context-aware coaching into managers’ workflow, it can become a standard, low-cost way for large organizations to uplift manager capability and team health at scale—advancing its mission to help the workforce reach its potential.[1][5]
Quick takeaway: Rising Team combines research-backed team-development content, guided workshop software, and AI coaching to help managers scale connection and development across tech and frontline teams—positioning it as a pragmatic, measurable alternative to expensive coaching and offsites as organizations prioritize retention and manager-led development.[1][3][5]
