Seattle tech veteran Chris Pitchford, known for co-founding Shyft and his role as vice president of sales at Ally, is now leading a new startup called Brev. Brev leverages large language models to assist companies in managing their reporting and analysis of business performance. Founded earlier this year, Brev offers a software solution that acts as a “business performance OS,” gathering and analyzing internal data from various sources and simplifying the creation of progress reports for metrics such as annual recurring revenue, sales forecasts, customer success, and more.
The main goal of Brev is to reduce the preparation work required for meetings or reviews, and in some cases, even eliminate the need for such meetings altogether. The software also extracts insights from unstructured data related to company metrics, automates meeting workflows, and aids in goal-setting. Chris Pitchford’s previous experience at Ally, a Seattle startup that focused on Objectives and Key Results (OKR), which was acquired by Microsoft in 2021, has influenced the development of Brev.
According to Pitchford, Brev sets itself apart from competitors with its “LLM-native approach to business performance management” and its ability to align with the goals and strategy of an organization. He believes that the future of this space lies in harnessing the power of AI in a much deeper way. Pitchford co-founded Brev with Vic Hu, a former engineering manager at Indeed who also has experience working at Meta, Iterative Health, and Panopto. The company’s founding engineer is Benn Graham.
Pitchford has recently relocated to San Francisco to be closer to Brev’s customers, while co-founder Vic Hu remains based in Seattle. Brev is currently self-funded and has not received any external funding. Ally founder Vetri Vellore has also launched a startup called Rhythms, based in the Seattle area, that uses AI to help companies improve their productivity. Overall, Brev aims to provide a streamlined solution for companies to manage their business performance effectively through the use of AI-driven tools and automation.
