On Thursday, machine learning startup Zeitworks launched out of stealth, and announced that it raised $4.5 million in seed funding. Seattle-based VC Madrona Venture Group led the funding round, with participation from Jazz Venture Partners and Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff.
Zeitworks spun out of the Madrona Venture Labs startup incubator. It’s led by CEO Ryan Windham, who was previously CEO of software companies AppViewX and Cedexis. Other Zeitworks co-founders include Ben Elowitz and Matthew Holloway. Each member of this trio has experience in entrepreneurship and building tech companies.
Zeitworks has developed a SaaS platform that uses machine learning to analyze its customers’ business processes step-by-step without interrupting them. It then takes that information and looks for ways to improve those processes, in order to make the business more efficient.
“The current method of business process improvement is ripe for disruption,” Elowitz said in a statement. “It interrupts workflow, is expensive in terms of dollars and time and doesn’t empower employees to be part of the process. Zeitworks changes the game to use real-world data to find improvements for leaders and teams.”
The company is headquartered in Seattle, but is currently in the process of opening up a Los Angeles office. The company is still small, but it’s actively hiring for roles in marketing, engineering and product. Right now, the Zeitworks platform is only available for select pilot customers, but the company is ramping up its efforts to plan for a larger product launch.
“Now more than ever, businesses are under enormous pressure to be more efficient, but the work that teams do has been a black box; impossible to measure, let alone improve,” Windham said in a statement. “With our innovative software solution, we can shine a light on all the work that gets done by teams within the enterprise — to not only show the bottlenecks but also drive improvements in real-time.”
