A Chat with Raushan Irgaliyeva, Founder and CEO at GrowthLens

“Financials and technology are audited before companies scale — leadership systems rarely are. GrowthLens brings intelligence and accountability to the most expensive risk in growth: human decision-making.”

Tell us about GrowthLens

GrowthLens is a human capital intelligence company helping scaleups, boards, and investors understand whether leadership teams are truly built to scale.

As companies progress through high-growth stages, complexity increases faster than structure. Decision quality declines, misalignment compounds, and leadership friction quietly erodes performance — often long before problems appear in financial or operational metrics.

GrowthLens applies people analytics to make these hidden risks visible and measurable, enabling organisations to scale with clarity rather than friction.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

Throughout my career, I have seen well-funded companies stall or fail not because of market conditions, but because their leadership systems collapsed under pressure.

Investors performed rigorous due diligence on technology and finance, yet had almost no visibility into leadership alignment, decision dynamics, or human risk. GrowthLens was created to close that gap — bringing the same analytical discipline to leadership and decision-making that already exists in other critical areas of the business.

Tell us about your core product or service: The Alignment Audit

The GrowthLens Alignment Audit is a leadership and decision-readiness assessment for scaleups.

Using validated people analytics, we map how founders and leadership teams think, decide, communicate, execute, and handle pressure. The output is a clear intelligence snapshot showing where leadership is complementary, where friction is inevitable, and where organisational design will break as the company scales.

Instead of relying on intuition or personal judgment, founders and boards receive data that informs hiring, role design, governance, and strategic priorities.

What most excites you about the people analytics industry?

Its ability to depersonalise leadership and conflict.

Historically, leadership challenges were framed as personality issues or cultural misfits. People analytics transforms these conversations into strategic discussions based on evidence — allowing organisations to design leadership systems deliberately rather than react emotionally when problems emerge.

This shift is turning people analytics into a core layer of organisational infrastructure, not just an HR tool.

What has been the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome along the way?

The “we’re fine” illusion.

Many leadership teams only seek help after friction becomes costly. Convincing them that proactive intelligence is far more valuable than reactive repair has been an ongoing challenge.

What is your number one piece of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?

Design your leadership and decision-making systems from the earliest stages of your product.

Early assumptions about authority, communication, and accountability compound rapidly as scale increases. Don’t rely on chemistry or goodwill — build clarity and alignment before pressure exposes the cracks.

What can we hope to see from GrowthLens in the future?

GrowthLens is evolving into a human capital intelligence platform supporting founders, boards, and investors with continuous insight into leadership risk, decision quality, and organisational readiness.

Our ambition is to move from one-off diagnostics to ongoing governance intelligence — helping companies scale intelligently by design, not by trial and error.