Insight Partners

Congratulations to ExaCare AI, a trailblazer in automation for operations teams in post-acute care facilities, on its $30M Series A raise! Insight Partners' George Mathew shared his thoughts on how ExaCare is empowering skilled nursing teams: "Post-acute providers operate under razor-thin margins and chronic staffing shortages, which have a real impact on health outcomes. ExaCare's agentic AI platform is addressing this head-on by making admissions simpler, more reliable, and measurably faster for operators and the people they serve. Laird Russell and the ExaCare AI team are relentless in their mission to improve post-acute care, and we're thrilled to back them on their journey." Please join us in congratulating ExaCare AI!

It was incredible to speak at ScaleUp:AI for Insight Partners with Jon Krohn. We talked about how most AI pilots fail in data issues (39%!), misaligned objectives, integration challenges, and governance issues (41%!). How can you guide your organization? Switch from Theater Mode to Leadership Mode: Theater Mode "Adopt AI or die!" "Are you scared of AI?" Checking phone during "AI strategy" meetings Pontificating without dialogue Leadership Mode “What customer magic will AI unlock?” “What parts of our business need to be unmistakably human?” Where do people create trust that AI can't? Where does AI create scale where our people can't?

The Rule of 40 has long been the standard for evaluating SaaS company performance, but it only tells part of the story. Managing Director Ryan Hinkle introduces the Rule of Insight, a framework that take a looks deeper into the drivers behind rule of 40.   💡 Learn how to use core SaaS metrics to tell a more compelling and durable growth story, and why understanding why you’re growing matters just as much as how fast.

In this week’s Onsite Hour, we examined how R&D leaders can run annual planning with precision — linking engineering investments to company-wide goals, sequencing multi-quarter priorities, and staying adaptable in a shifting market.   Hosted by Insight’s Malaika Paquiot and Jordi Buller from the R&D Center of Excellence, and featuring engineering leader Dory Weiss, the session unpacked what effective R&D planning looks like in practice — from aligning product and finance to managing capacity, cut lines, and real trade-offs.   We covered: 🧩 Why effective annual planning starts with shared company objectives, not a list of engineering projects — and how to build a planning rhythm that includes finance and go-to-market teams from the outset. 🧩 How to model capacity before promising delivery — quantifying maintenance, tech debt, and unplanned work so teams commit to what they can actually ship. 🧩 How to rank initiatives by business impact, complexity, and cost — using a single framework that keeps trade-offs transparent and decisions defensible. 🧩 Why publishing “cut lines” is essential — clarity on what’s funded, what’s deferred, and what gets dropped protects focus and trust across the organization. 🧩 How to adapt the planning process for the AI era — from building fluency across roles to rethinking how product, data, and engineering collaborate to capture efficiency and speed.   Annual planning done well is not about prediction; it’s about creating alignment, transparency, and the ability to adjust with discipline when the year does not always go to plan.   Looking for your next career move? Explore 11.5K+ open roles across the Insight portfolio, where product innovation, R&D, and strategic planning fuel growth for the year ahead: https://lnkd.in/egHgPjyX

That’s a wrap on ScaleUp:AI 2025! This year, we brought together founders, builders, enterprise execs, investors, and researchers from 70+ countries — with 3,000+ registrants and nearly 400 joining us in person. 💡 Key takeaways from the day: • The agentic enterprise is taking shape. “The difference between software and service is going to look a lot more blurred,” said Jeff Horing, Insight Partners’ cofounder and managing director. • Process is the new moat. As Ethan Mollick reminded us, real advantage comes from execution, not model size. • Humans still anchor the loop. Creativity, judgment, and accountability remain essential. • Reliability, security, and ethics are becoming the new infrastructure. Transformation is costly — but delay is costlier. We also celebrated New York’s rise as an AI capital, with New York City Economic Development Corporation's Andrew Kimball announcing new AI literacy initiatives shaping the city’s innovation ecosystem. 🤝 A special thank-you to our partners: Adobe • Dell Technologies • Google Cloud Security • iCapital • Morgan Stanley • NYSE • Oracle • Rackspace Technology • SAP • Silicon Valley Bank • Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP • Acceldata • A.Team • Copado • CrewAI • Exiger • HoneyHive • incident.io • Kiteworks • Lightrun • Marketing Evolution • Postman • Precisely • Promptfoo • Runware • Shelf • Skyflow • Valence • WRITER • T200 • Riviera Partners Your collaboration and support make ScaleUp:AI possible. And to our incredible speakers and attendees — thank you for fueling another year of forward-thinking conversation and connection. 📩 Registrants, watch your inbox for session recordings. ▶️ Missed it? Subscribe to the Insight Partners YouTube channel to catch select sessions later this year.

What if the internet were designed today? 🌐 That’s the question Avery Pennarun, David Carney, and David Crawshaw asked when they founded Tailscale — and their answer is reshaping how the world connects. Instead of building bigger, centralized systems, the team focused on something simpler: secure, peer-to-peer connectivity that “just works.” Developers were the first to adopt it — but today, Tailscale powers connectivity for thousands of businesses and plays a key role at the edges of the AI economy. Read more about their journey: https://lnkd.in/e86kQE3X

AI agents are redefining productivity. Physical agents will redefine labor. In this new investor POV, Managing Director Lonne Jaffe, Adithya Sanjay, and Sourish Jasti discuss how robotics is evolving from research prototypes to real-world systems that deliver measurable ROI. What you’ll find inside: • The case for vertical Robotics-as-a-Service (vRaaS) — and why domain specialization is winning over general-purpose bots • How simulation, teleoperation, and live data are closing the gap from prototype to deployment • A deep dive into leading use cases — from logistics and inspection to agriculture, cleaning, security, and industrial automation • Strategic insights on scaling — when to expand, when to pivot, and when to double down

It’s officially here 🎉 ScaleUp:AI ’25 kicks off today in New York and online! We’re thrilled to bring together an incredible lineup of speakers, partners, and attendees for a day of insights and conversations driving the next era of AI innovation. Stay tuned to our X feed for real-time updates and highlights from the event: https://x.com/scaleupevent #ScaleUpAI

In this week’s Onsite Hour, we tackled one of the most important processes for any software company heading into 2025: annual planning for GTM alignment.   Annual planning isn’t just budgeting — it’s a highly complex, impactful process that ScaleUp companies run each year. Done right, it creates the operating blueprint that aligns sales, marketing, product, and customer success behind one coordinated growth strategy.   In our session, hosted by Insight’s Eric Gilroy and Ajay Gandhi with ELLKAY's CEO Ajay Kapare, CFO Joe Stadther, and Chief of Staff Simoli Patel, we unpacked how today’s best operators tackle it:   🚣 Anchor on the growth waterfall — Move from Excel “plugs” to business cases that tie revenue and margin goals directly to levers like new logos, cross-sell, or pricing. 🚣 Pressure-test every lever — Quantify ROI, cost, headcount impact, and risks before it enters the plan. 🚣 Run interlocks like a PMO — Structure cross-functional sessions to validate assumptions, align dependencies, and negotiate trade-offs. 🚣 Set AI-driven stretch goals — Model TAM expansion, cross-sell lift, and productivity gains against real KPIs, not hype. 🚣 Plan on a 90-day calendar — Kick off in September, iterate with ELT in November, and finalize by year-end to launch execution on day one. 🚣 Avoid inertia traps — Late starts, unclear ownership, or weak financial cases derail plans before they hit the field.   The takeaway: Annual Planning is where strategy becomes executable. The best companies treat it as a living system, balancing ambition with credibility, aligning across functions, and stress-testing assumptions so GTM teams stay efficient, resilient, and ready to adapt.   We’ve got 3.8k+ open GTM roles across the Insight portfolio – join a company where planning isn’t an afterthought, it’s your game plan to win in 2026: https://lnkd.in/eg_WE8Dn