Companies are pouring money into AI tools, but most teams still feel stuck. Work is scattered across apps, messages pile up, and employees spend hours just keeping everyone aligned. That coordination problem is quickly becoming the real bottleneck.
San Francisco-based Highlight AI has raised $40 million in a Series A round led by Khosla Ventures, with backing from 359 Capital, General Catalyst, Valor Equity, Common Metal, Makers Fund, Arcadia, and SV Angel.
With the new funding, Highlight plans to double its headcount, focusing on hiring engineers, operators, and marketers in San Francisco to accelerate product development and go-to-market efforts.
Building a shared intelligence layer
Led by Sergei Sorokin, Highlight is building what it calls a “shared intelligence layer” for the workplace.
The idea is simple: instead of employees jumping between multiple tools and manually stitching together context, the platform captures everything happening across apps like Slack, Figma, and Linear, then turns it into a unified, usable memory for teams.
“AI’s limitations in the workplace are no longer due to intelligence or capability. It’s a coordination bottleneck. Without shared memory across tools, people are forced to copy and paste between systems and track their work by hand, spending countless hours reassembling it instead of moving it forward. Highlight is building the collective intelligence layer for the agentic age, unifying coordination and memory so work can move forward proactively rather than being constantly reassembled,” said Sorokin.
Highlight’s system works in the background. It records decisions, tracks changes, assigns tasks, and even drafts follow-ups automatically. Someone who missed a meeting can instantly see what happened without digging through chats or documents.
“Software and AI have advanced faster than the systems that coordinate them. That gap exists across every industry and at every scale. As work becomes more agent-driven, an operating system that maintains alignment between humans and machines becomes imperative,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures.
