While much attention has been paid to sales and marketing alignment, there's another critical gap quietly eating away at company growth: the divide between product builders and customer-facing teams. It's a problem Berit Hoffmann observed firsthand during her time as a product leader at Google, driving her to co-found Korl with longtime collaborator Sumeet Pannu as CTO.
Korl was a member of Stage 2 Capital's 2024 Catalyst Program, and we’re enthusiastic about the solution they’re providing for a widespread problem that no other company is solving in such a smart, holistic way.
At its core, Hoffmann explains, the problem comes down to alignment. While product teams are focused on building features that solve user problems, there's often a disconnect in how that value gets communicated to the market. Customer success and account teams struggle to translate detailed product documentation into crisp value statements for buyers and users, as well as how the product aligns to each customer’s unique business goals. This misalignment can lead to serious business downsides: it costs companies real money, leading to lower adoption, challenging renewal cycles, and missed growth opportunities.
As one head of customer success told Hoffmann, they have to "justify a seven and a half percent increase with one hand behind my back" when they can't articulate the value of recent product innovations to customers.
"We had certainly observed customer-facing teams not having the visibility they needed to engage customers and drive adoption effectively," says Hoffmann. "But having been on the product and engineering side, we also know that asking teams to pause development work for documentation isn't always the best use of their time — they need to stay focused on building and shipping product."
Why Now: AI Unlocks a New Approach
Historically, companies have tried to solve the misalignment challenge through product roadmapping tools, internal wikis, and documentation processes.
"These solutions fall short because they are very focused on solving a problem for PMs, but that isn't the ultimate stakeholder,” Hoffmann said. “The job to be done is not ‘broadcasting product changes’—it’s figuring out for each customer how your product addresses the specific problems they need to solve. It’s about translating value in a highly personalized, relevant way."
The emergence of generative AI opened up new possibilities.
"The aha moment for us was realizing there's all this rich data sitting in these functionally siloed systems of record,” Hoffmann continued. “With generative AI and agentic workflows, we don't need people collecting and summarizing it anymore. AI can easily scale to gather context and find connections well beyond our human limits."
How Korl Works
Korl uses AI to automatically bridge the gap between product development and customer-facing teams. The platform connects to existing tools like Jira, Google Docs, and Salesforce to aggregate product information and infer which features are most relevant to each customer. It then uses AI to transform this raw data into content that sales and customer success teams can put to use right away.
Korl proactively generates presentations, emails, and talk tracks at critical customer milestones, such as roadmap discussions, executive business reviews, and renewal conversations. Its presentation agent crafts relevant content for each use case to ensure every conversation is engaging and impactful.
"The emergence of generative AI and agentic frameworks opened up this door," said Hoffmann. "We can now automatically generate these artifacts that traditionally are just insanely painful and time-consuming, but are so critical to the business."
The Korl platform works in three key stages:
From Product Leaders to Go-to-Market Students
Hoffmann and Pannu were already product experts before they founded Korl, having spent over a decade building software. But go-to-market was new territory for them. They knew they needed to learn more, so they joined Stage 2 Capital's Catalyst program.
"We are very comfortable building products, doing customer discovery, and thinking about what's possible," Hoffmann said. "But where we are not as naturally experienced as a founding team was around that go-to-market motion. You can't just build it and expect they will come — that's more true now than it's ever been because of the noise and software fatigue."
But beyond the 10-week go-to-market curriculum, the real value came from the network. The program connected them with Rob Huffstedtler, a Stage 2 Limited Partner and GTM advisor, who became a weekly mentor, helping them refine everything from messaging to early sales process structure.
“Korl is tackling a critical market need by bridging the gap between product and customer-facing teams—something many struggle with but few solve effectively,” said Rob. “Berit and Sumeet brought deep R&D expertise, and it was impressive to see them apply that same rigor to sharpening their go-to-market approach. Through our sessions, we clarified their ideal customer profile, messaging, and outreach strategy, making everything more focused and effective.”
For Hoffmann, that guidance was invaluable. “The group of LPs that Stage 2 gives access to is such a rich source of knowledge and expertise, and there’s just so much willingness to help,” she says. That network has already yielded early customers, including Sendoso and DataCamp.
Looking Ahead
Fresh off their public launch, Hoffmann is energized by both the market response and the longer-term potential as AI capabilities evolve. "We've got some really experimental stuff we're building that I'm very excited about," she hints. "We're seeing an incredibly high pace of change with how the LLMs are evolving and how people are truly starting to think about these agentic workflows."
Her Advice to Other Founders?
Don't get paralyzed trying to perfect everything upfront.
"It's easy to feel paralyzed by needing to come up with the perfect vision or the answer to every question," she reflects. "You need to have a very targeted pitch of what you do today and who it's for, but you also need to have the compelling vision that is a multi-billion dollar opportunity. My advice would be not to get overly worried about that. These things evolve."
Or as she puts it more succinctly: "The only way to it is through it."