Performance reviews are one of the most important and time-tested tools in human resources departments’ arsenal, but according to Reflektive Inc., there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

The San Francisco-based startup is advocating a “continuous” approach to tracking employee productivity that has managed to draw the attention of Silicon Valley investors. Among them is Lightspeed Venture Partners, which was today named as the lead contributor to a new $25 million funding round into Reflektive. The investment comes less than a year after the startup’s previous $13 million haul.

Reflektive announced the latter round, which was led by Lightspeed as well, on the same day that it introduced the current iteration of its flagship performance tracking service. The platform provides a feedback sharing interface that can be overlaid on Gmail and other business applications to establish a direct channel for giving employees input.

When a worker completes a business report ahead of schedule, the manager may use Reflektive’s platform to acknowledge the good work. The service also provides a medium for members of the rank-and-file to share feedback with one another about day-to-day work. At Instacart Inc., for example, the infrastructure and development teams rely on Reflektive to exchange technical advice.

The startup’s goal is to let companies provide feedback to employees in a more timely form than performance reviews that are released once every quarter, six months or year. But that is not to say Reflektive wants to do away with performance reviews altogether. Quite the opposite, in fact. The real-time feedback sharing mechanism in its platform doubles as a sort of archive that lets managers quickly assemble activity information when it’s time to write their employee assessments.

Reflektive claims that its service thus not only reduces the time it takes to create performance reviews but also improves their accuracy in the process. Instead of having to rely on memory or asking around the office when evaluating a worker, managers can simply use the startup’s platform to bring up relevant details. Its algorithms can compile key productivity statistics automatically to speed up the process.

Besides Instagram, Reflektive’s platform has also won over Twilio Inc., Pinterest Inc., Nutanix Inc. and about 200 other customers. The cash from today’s round will help the startup broaden its user base even further by financing the development of new features. 

Image courtesy of Reflektive