Keeping Strategy Off the Shelf
Today’s featured startup is helping companies turn strategy from a PDF into a living, breathing system.
Project Overview
Elate is a strategic planning platform that helps companies align big-picture goals with daily execution.
It combines everything you need to keep strategy alive:
setting clear goals,
tracking execution across teams,
and regularly reviewing results to adjust course when needed.
Planning starts with defining top-level strategic goals — which can be co-created on the platform with comments, suggestions, and edits from key stakeholders. Once the plan is finalized, everyone involved must vote to approve it before it rolls out across the company.
To avoid overload, Elate flags teams that are juggling too many objectives — reminding managers that spreading resources too thin won’t get results.
Once the strategy is approved, each department builds its own action plan to support the company-wide goals. Progress can be tracked through integrations with corporate tools, and team members get automatic reminders when tasks fall behind or underperform.
A visual dashboard shows how each team is doing, where bottlenecks are, and how much of the plan is complete. Elate makes it clear that strategy is not static — it’s a living process. So the platform helps schedule regular check-ins, nudges teams to review their performance, and prioritizes strategic updates just as highly as daily tasks.
So far, Elate has raised $3.2 million, bringing its total funding to $9.4 million.
What’s the Gist?
We’ve all heard of project management tools. But strategic planning platforms? Not so much — and that’s a problem.
Project management is tactical. But strategy? That’s the real game. As military theorist Clausewitz put it: “Tactical victories can’t compensate for strategic failure.”
Without clear, transparent strategic goals, teams tend to fall into a loop of busywork — delivering tasks without understanding what they're truly working toward. And when the inevitable happens — project delays, budget overruns, scope creep — how can anyone course-correct if they’ve lost sight of the original goal?
Elate’s structure fixes that.
First, it flows top-down: from strategy → to initiatives → to team-level actions.
Then, it closes the loop bottom-up: feeding performance insights → back to strategy → to refine future goals.
Despite being relatively under the radar, the strategic planning software market was already worth $1.5B in 2023, and it’s expected to hit $5.5B by 2030. That’s well past the $1B “viable market” threshold for startups — which means there’s real opportunity here.
And Elate isn’t alone.
Ignition raised $8M using AI to turn user feedback and competitor data into smarter product roadmaps.
ProperPlan (pre-launch, raised £300K) targets solopreneurs and small businesses with an AI assistant that builds action plans based on their goals and resources.
This market is heating up — and it’s just getting started.
Key Takeaways
Startups like Ignition and ProperPlan are already experimenting with AI-driven planning — which could make strategy tools more accessible and intuitive.
As these tools become simpler and more effective, adoption could skyrocket — especially among small and midsize businesses, which make up the bulk of the market.
That opens the door to a big question:
What would a strategy platform look like if it were built for the average founder or small business owner?
Maybe it starts with building one for yourself. Map your own planning process:
How do you set goals today?
How do you track execution?
What slows you down?
What would you automate if you could?
And how could AI help?
Chances are, if it works for you — it’ll work for a hundred other startup founders and small business owners too.
Company Info
Elate
Website: goelate.com
Last round: $3.2M, 02.04.2024
Total Investment: $9.4M, across 4 rounds