About

NextDot is an AI-powered platform for continuous people development. It enables professionals to grow through collaboration and the ongoing exchange of feedback with their teammates, and gives organisations an honest, evidence-based picture of how their people are developing while the work is still happening. Its founding principle is that feedback attaches to work, not to the person. Work is captured as "dots”, meaningful, time-bound pieces of work worth talking about. Collaborators exchange feedback inside each dot as the work progresses. Because the feedback is about work and decoupled from assessment, it is honest, frequent and developmental. Assessment is then derived by AI from the accumulated evidence, read against the organisation's own competency framework, and continuously drafted as a review that both professional and manager can see. NextDot enables people growth; encourages motivating yet constructive feedback; facilitates coaching, mentoring and 1:1 check-ins; aligns development and goals with the organisation's strategic priorities; reveals skill insights; and shows leaders and HR where their people stand and where the gaps are. Delivered on web and mobile as self-serve SaaS, it connects to the tools organisations already use. It is in pilot with organisations running live review cycles, has a queue of prospects waiting to onboard, and is raising 2,000,000 EUR to scale engineering and marketing.

Solution & Product

NextDot was born from a frustration its founders lived first-hand, performance management that did not develop people. Reviews were biased and backward-looking, goals drifted from daily work, promotions followed arbitrary timelines, and organisations did not know their people well enough to decide with confidence. NextDot introduces continuous feedback built around dots: meaningful, time-bound initiatives, owned by one person or co-owned by a group (team dots). Within each dot, collaborators exchange real-time feedback or feedforward as work progresses. This feedback is decoupled from formal assessment. It exists purely to help people improve. Assessment is derived from the accumulated evidence: AI analyses each comment in context, attributes it to the right person, and continuously drafts a review against the organisation's own configurable competency framework, refreshed daily and signed off by the manager. Goals are set in OKR style and linked directly to dots, giving a clear line of sight between company objectives and actual work, with goal alignment computed across the whole org chart. A private AI Development Assistant helps each person articulate their work, reflect and prepare for 1:1 check-ins, not necessarily restricted to the reporting line. Insights reveal peer perception, hard and soft skill gaps and growth. Work flows in automatically from Teams, Jira, GitHub, Azure DevOps, Google Drive and ClickUp, with a 3 up to 6 month import at onboarding.

Innovation & Scalability

NextDot approaches people development in a fundamentally new way. Existing tools digitise the appraisal form and ask managers to remember. NextDot starts from how people actually develop: through everyday collaboration. Teammates exchange feedback and recommendations while discussing their work; NextDot captures these discussions and, with AI, understands how teammates perceive each other, which soft and hard skills are growing and which need development. From those insights it proposes next dots and goals, drafts reviews continuously with an explicit confidence measure, and even coaches people to give better feedback. What is new: feedback is kept separate from assessment by design. Work (and not the person) is the unit of development. When a team receives feedback, AI works out which individual it applies to and records it as evidence against the organisation's own framework. A person's skills are described by what colleagues say, not by self-assessment. Reviews are built from that evidence instead of written from memory. All of this works inside NextDot's web and mobile apps, or on data aggregated from the tools the organisation already uses (Slack, Teams, Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub and more), under the permissions the organisation sets and the evidence each person accepts. It scales because it is built as a self-serve onboarding with automated import, configuration and customisation by the customer, a repeatable event-sourced AI pipeline, per-seat SaaS pricing (10 EUR

Traction & achievements

NextDot is a live product in production, currently in pilot use by several organisations covering 500 professionals who are evaluating it against their existing processes. These are real processes: the pilots' current review cycle finalises inside NextDot, with the first full cycle completions expected in December 2026. Some pilots export NextDot data into legacy review systems they intend to decommission. Shipped to date: the core platform on web and mobile (dots, feedback conversations, goals, 1:1 check-ins, permissions, notifications); AI Reviews and enhanced Goal Alignment (launched July 2026); the private Development Assistant; integrations with Microsoft Teams, Jira, GitHub, Azure DevOps, Google Drive and ClickUp with a 12-month work-history import (code-complete, being staged for rollout); a natural-language reporting agent; and a public website with published pricing. Pipeline: about 33 prospect organisations (leads) have asked to onboard within 30 to 90 days with their data imported and year-end reviews run in NextDot. Named engagements include a maritime-fintech prospect with a full demo environment, a major Greek bank evaluating the Teams app, and a partnership proposal with ETA Technologies. Credibility: a promising lead with the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC), which could potentially see NextDot adopted by numerous coaches as a coaching tool; demos to EMCC have already led to product changes to comply with their framework.

Team & Why Us

We have approached people development in a way completely different from traditional solutions. People development is a collaborative process that happens through interaction and team effort, not through forms. This precise process is what NextDot captures and surfaces. The insights it gathers reveal behaviours, skills and gaps that the tools organisations use today cannot see, because those tools never look at the work. The idea came from former experience, not a market study. Years of building software, leading teams and sitting on both sides of reviews that developed no one. The leaders of our team are: Co-Founders: Alexandros Basakidis . Dimitris Livas: Software developers and team leaders with an extensive experience in coaching and team building Thomas Oikonomakos, Head of Product author of the platform's information-architecture model, user flows and product specifications. Extensive experience in ana;ysis and product design and definition. Yiannis Kavvouras CTO: in charge of the software architecture, front-end, back-end, RAG, MCP etc. Extensive experience in software architecture and development as well as in team leading How we work: agile software development (Scrum), user stories definition, grooming, so engineering moves fast without rework; and AI assisted development across product, analysis and code. That discipline, combined with engineering mindset, depth and first-hand knowledge of the problem, is our advantage.

Funding Needs

We are raising 2,000,000 EUR to scale the development team and to push for more aggressive marketing and advertising. The model we pursue is self-registration and self-use Software as a Service: organisations sign up, connect their tools, import their data and run their people-development processes without any integration or customisation work by our team. This is the growth model. Per-seat pricing means revenue scales with each organisation while the marginal cost is almost entirely compute, but only if onboarding needs no human. Today we can hand-hold about five organisations at a time while about 33 prospects wait; the automated import is code-complete but withheld until the unattended journey is trustworthy. Use of funds: engineering (1,000,000€): increase the team by 5 people (2 senior developer2, 1 senior AI/machine learning engineer, 1 senior devops/test auromation engineer, 1 senior UX/UI), ship self-serve onboarding and import, complete integrations and identity resolution, build the attribution pipeline, configurable performance framework and Goal Assistant from existing specifications, and harden security, scaling and EU inference, continuous models training and tweaking. Marketing and sales (1,000,000€): LinkedIn-led demand generation aimed at HR leaders and managers, Google Ads, partnerships (EMCC, ETA), pilot case studies, and a small customer-success team. Targets over 24 months: 20 paying organisations, 5,000 seats. MRR of EUR 50,000, fully self-serve.