Trace

The problem

As teams went hybrid, managers lost the informal signals that told them who was overloaded, who was stuck and who was about to leave. Hallway conversations and visible late nights disappeared, replaced by calendars and chat threads that hide more than they reveal. Burnout often became visible only when someone resigned, and by then it was too late. Leaders wanted insight without becoming surveillance machines.

Why now

Hybrid work has become permanent for many companies, but management practices have not caught up. Leaders lost visibility into how work was actually happening, and many responded with intrusive monitoring tools that damaged trust. At the same time, employees became more vocal about burnout and wellbeing, and retention became a major cost concern. Companies needed a way to understand team health without spying on people. Trace offered a privacy-respecting middle path at a time when both employers and employees were looking for a better approach.

The founders

Nadia Petrova is an organisational psychologist who spent years advising companies on team health and retention. Chris Allen built analytics products at a workplace software company and understood how much signal existed in everyday work tools. They met while Nadia was consulting for Chris’s employer, and they shared a conviction that most workplace analytics were either useless or invasive, with very little in between.

Why we invested

Juno backed Trace because it measured workload and focus patterns without reading anyone’s messages. The product looked at metadata such as meeting load, after-hours activity and fragmentation of focus time, then presented team-level trends rather than individual scores. Employees could see their own data, which built trust rather than fear. Juno believed that respecting privacy would become a competitive advantage as regulation and employee expectations evolved.

How we helped

After investing, we helped Trace find early customers among people leaders in our portfolio and network. Juno worked with the founders on messaging that addressed privacy concerns directly, which shortened sales cycles. Our platform team supported them in publishing anonymised research on hybrid work patterns, which generated press coverage and inbound demand from companies wrestling with the same questions.

Where they are now

Trace now helps people teams spot burnout risk early and make better decisions about meeting culture, workload and staffing. Its anonymised benchmarks have become a reference for how healthy hybrid teams actually work. Customers report lower attrition in teams that act on Trace’s insights. Nadia and Chris recently launched manager coaching prompts that suggest small, practical changes before small problems become resignations.