Highlight AI, an AI software company developing an intelligent operating system for teams and AI agents, announced it has raised $40 million in a Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from 359 Capital, General Catalyst, Valor Equity, Common Metal, Makers Fund, Collaborative Fund, Arcadia, and SV Angel.
The company also appointed Sergei Sorokin, a former Discord executive, as CEO. Sorokin brings more than 15 years of experience building and scaling global consumer products, including eight years at Discord, where he led product development and helped grow the platform from about 5 million to nearly 300 million monthly active users. After leaving Discord, he spent two years working with AI startups, including Weights, Aura, and OffCall.
Highlight AI is focused on addressing what it describes as the “coordination tax,” the time, effort, and cognitive load required to keep teams aligned across tools and workflows. Research cited in the announcement suggests this burden can consume up to 24 hours per employee each week. Despite widespread adoption of generative AI, with nearly 80 percent of companies using it, many report little measurable impact on productivity, highlighting a gap between AI capability and effective coordination.
The company is building infrastructure to capture, model, and retrieve high-fidelity team context in real time. Its platform integrates across tools to create a shared memory layer that automatically records decisions, assigns tasks, and generates follow-ups, reducing the need for manual coordination. By preserving context across workflows, Highlight aims to help teams move from reactive task management to proactive, AI-assisted execution.
The platform is designed to sit above existing enterprise applications, enabling it to unify activity across tools such as communication platforms, design software, and development environments. Highlight’s system captures work as it happens, ensuring that knowledge persists across team changes and over time, while allowing employees to access synthesized insights without searching across multiple systems.
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. The company is positioning itself as foundational infrastructure for what it calls the “agentic age of work,” where humans and AI agents collaborate at scale.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI’s limitations in the workplace are no longer due to intelligence or capability. It’s a coordination bottleneck, Without a shared memory across tools, people are forced to copy and paste between systems and track work by hand, spending countless hours reassembling work 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. I am joining Highlight at a pivotal moment, one that offers a rare opportunity to help shape foundational infrastructure from the ground up, rather than incrementally improving systems that were never designed for agent-driven work.”
Sergei Sorokin, CEO, Highlight AI
“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.”
Vinod Khosla, Founder, Khosla Ventures
