A Coach for the Rest of Us

Coaching is the kind of help everyone needs. Access to it has always been reserved for a few.

Executives get coaches. The people who report to them — first-time managers, ICs pushing for a stretch role, and new leads navigating their first round of layoffs — get a once-a-year review and a manager too stretched to coach them. A $20-billion industry has been built almost entirely around the people whose careers were already set to compound.

I noticed this asymmetry as a CMO. I had access to the kind of structured, ongoing coaching that the people reporting to me did not. The coaching gap was never a talent problem. It was an access problem. And it has been getting wider for thirty years. The World Economic Forum projects (opens in new tab) that 22% of jobs will be disrupted by 2030 and 39% of core skills will change. Each of those transitions — when to retrain, when to pivot, when to push for a stretch role — gets navigated one career at a time. The people whose jobs are about to change the most are the people with the least access to the support that helps them change.

Silvia Oviedo López (opens in new tab) and Siddhartha Dabral (opens in new tab) built Blomma (opens in new tab) to close that gap. Blomma launches today (opens in new tab) to put a private AI career coach within reach for anyone who wants one for $25 a month, no employer required.

Blomma is not a chatbot dressed in coaching clothing. It is built around the architecture coaching has always run on: continuity, accountability, and memory. Goals get set, tracked, and revisited. Reflections compound across sessions instead of resetting. Inputs from your calendar, notes, and performance reviews ground the guidance in the actual reality of your work, not a generic version of it. Every byte of that lives in a private space owned by the person using it, not the employer and not the platform.

The difference is meaningful. A chatbot answers your question. A coach remembers what you are trying to become. Blomma is built for the second case.

The case for why now is one of the best I have seen.

Founders who lived the problem

Coaching and career development is not a category venture has rushed to back. The wellness apps that came before treated career growth like meditation — light, episodic, easy to cancel. Blomma is the first product I have seen that takes the architecture of real coaching seriously, and the first to put the relationship in the hands of the person doing the work rather than the org chart that employs them.

Founder and CEO Silvia is one of the most operationally credentialed founders we have backed. She grew up in a small village in rural Spain, immigrated to the United States at 26 with a ten-month-old daughter, and trained as a translator before finding her way into product. At Pinterest, she helped scale the platform globally to more than 500 million users. At Canva, she scaled a team of 1,500+ as SVP of Content and Discovery. Blomma addresses a problem she lived. Her co-founder and CTO, Siddhartha Dabral, has co-founded and exited two companies and has built scaled infrastructure across mobile payments and crypto. He also happens to be married to a coach, which means he has spent years close to the craft of the work and not just the wrapper around it.

And they have built a world class advisory board: It includes Marshall Goldsmith, executive coach and author of What Got You Here Won't Get You There; Rachel Lockett, executive coach and former HR leader at Stripe and Pinterest; Jeremy Sirota, former CEO of Merlin and a longtime mentor across tech and music; and Dan Brodnitz, former head of global content for LinkedIn Learning.

Felicis is honored to lead Blomma's seed round. They are joined by an unusually deep bench of operators and angels including Evan Sharp (co-founder, Pinterest), Jonathan Shottan (CPO, Tonal), Tanya Raheja (formerly Canva and Stitch Fix), Kunal Gupta (Founder), Suman Chagarlamudi (Pinterest), Joe Hyrkin (former CEO, Issuu), Malik Ducard (CCO, Pinterest, formerly YouTube), and Omar Seyal (Meta, formerly Pinterest).

I believe that Blomma is how coaching stops being a luxury good and starts being a public good, which is something that is long overdue.