Former Discord Executive Sergei Sorokin Appointed as Highlight AI CEO
Highlight AI, the intelligent operating system for teams and AI agents, announced a $40 million 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. Former Discord VP of Product Sergei Sorokin joins the company as CEO to lead its mission of building the collective intelligence layer for the agentic age. Highlight aims to eliminate the growing “coordination tax,” the time, effort, and cognitive load required to keep teams aligned, which research suggests can consume up to 24 hours per employee each week.
Sorokin brings more than 15 years of experience building and scaling global consumer products, including eight years at Discord, where he led product, including the development of AI features, and helped grow the platform from roughly 5 million to nearly 300 million monthly active users, and built its revenue business from the ground up. After leaving Discord, he spent two years building and advising AI startups – working with companies including Weights, Aura, and OffCall – where he saw firsthand how fragmented tools and agent workflows fail to deliver real productivity gains. That experience positions Sorokin to lead Highlight at a critical moment as it builds a shared intelligence layer that unifies work, preserves context, and frees teams to focus on what matters.
We’ve entered the agentic age of work, with humans and AI agents operating in tandem at scale, yet widespread AI adoption has delivered little measurable impact on productivity. Nearly 80 percent of companies use generative AI, yet a similar number report little impact on their bottom line, revealing a widening gap between capability and coordination. Employees switch between up to eight applications a day as humans and AI generates endless output messages, documents, tickets, and drafts. This can sometimes yield thousands of items requiring attention, turning work into a constant coordination triage rather than creative focus.
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Under the hood, Highlight is building core infrastructure to securely capture, model, and retrieve high-fidelity team context in real time. The platform combines user-controlled capture with a unified team memory engine and proactive command center, enabling Highlight to understand activity across tools and teams and act with context rather than brittle rules or one-off prompts.
Imagine a product team that has already connected certain work apps to Highlight, is wrapping up a design review in Figma, and is continuing the follow-up discussion in Slack. Highlight automatically records the meeting and captures what changed, what was decided, and who owns which actions across those tools. It prepares draft follow-ups with links to the relevant Figma frames, drafts tasks in Linear with the right context, and updates the product spec. Team members review and send those updates with a single click. After the update is shared, an engineer who missed the meeting can immediately see the full synthesis of decisions and next steps without having to follow digital breadcrumbs across their enterprise applications. Then, they can review a pull request generated by a background Cursor agent that begins implementing the feature.
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This example illustrates how several hours of communication and coordination can be eliminated within a single team, a savings that compounds significantly when scaled across an organization.
Highlight captures the full arc of work as it happens, ensuring critical context survives role changes, team growth, and time, and giving employees immediate clarity without asking or searching. In doing so, Highlight turns everyday work into shared organizational memory that persists beyond any single employee.
“AI’s limitations in the workplace are no longer due to intelligence or capability. It’s a coordination bottleneck,” said Sergei Sorokin, CEO of Highlight AI. “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.”
“Software and AI have advanced faster than the systems that coordinate them,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. “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.”
Working with proactive AI requires a fundamental shift in how people and teams collaborate, blending enterprise and consumer product challenges. To meet that need, Highlight is growing a team of product builders with experience creating intuitive, collaborative products at scale, including leaders from Discord, Medal.tv, and Meta. 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.
