15Five

15Five: Performance Management Built Around Manager Effectiveness

15Five is a strategic performance management platform combining software, training, and coaching to help HR teams and managers drive engagement and performance. The company was founded in 2011 in San Francisco; sources differ on the exact founding roster, with PrivCo citing David Hassell, Nazar Ivaniv, and Shane Metcalf, and Crunchbase adding Jim Morrisroe (PrivCo; Crunchbase, 2026). Hassell serves as CEO. The company has raised roughly $98 million in total funding across multiple rounds, including a $52 million Series C round in July 2022 led by Quad Partners with participation from Next47, Origin Ventures, and Matrix Partners, among others (SiliconANGLE; Built In San Francisco, 2022). 15Five has grown through acquisition as well, acquiring performance-coaching company Kona and employee-engagement platform Emplify (Tracxn, 2026).

What 15Five does

15Five's platform combines software tools, weekly check-ins, OKR tracking, 360-degree reviews, peer recognition, and engagement surveys, with training and coaching specifically aimed at improving frontline and first-time manager effectiveness (15Five blog; SiliconANGLE, 2022). The company's product Transform, launched in recent years, blends custom coaching with educational content to help managers become better leaders, reflecting the company's founding thesis that managers are the "keystone" of high performance across an organization (Built In San Francisco, 2022). More recently, 15Five has added AI capabilities aimed at improving continuous performance management feedback (Tracxn, 2026).

Where it fits

15Five serves HR leaders and managers at organizations including Credit Karma, Spotify, and Pendo (Startup Intros, 2026), and the company reports more than 3,000 customers overall. It's a fit for HR teams that see manager quality as a root cause of engagement and performance problems, and that want a platform combining software with actual training and coaching rather than software alone.

Why this matters for people leaders

Performance management tools frequently fail not because the software is bad, but because managers using them were never taught how to have a good performance conversation in the first place. 15Five's bet, that improving manager effectiveness directly through training and coaching matters as much as the review cycle itself, addresses a root cause that most performance platforms leave untouched. For organizations focused on Culture, Performance, and Retention, that's an important distinction: employees consistently cite their direct manager as the single biggest factor in whether they stay or leave, which makes manager-focused tools a more direct lever than employee-facing features alone.

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