Sharp Performance Raises $18M for First Responder Coaching

A department buying Sharp Performance gets a report with a deliberate limit: the individual coaching conversations stay out of it. For CEO and co-founder Ben Curley and co-founder Andrew Sakmar, a former Green Beret, that boundary is part of the service they are asking public-safety leaders to fund.

Sharp has raised an $18M Series A led by Hidden Variable, joined by Andreessen Horowitz, Commonweal Ventures, Wolfson Group, FJ Labs and the Ford Foundation. The Carlsbad-based coaching company reports $30M in cumulative funding, supporting a business that connects first responders with experienced coaches outside their departments. Its company announcement is dated October 8, 2026; the corresponding issuer release distributed through Business Wire followed on October 15.

What Sharp's Series A Will Support

Sharp says the financing will extend its reach into more departments and states, improve its mobile app and coaching platform, and support additional products for first-responder health and performance. Those plans put the company in a familiar enterprise position with an unusually personal adoption problem: the organization can buy access, but each employee still decides whether to use it.

The latest issuer release reports more than 110 police, fire and EMS departments across 18 states, with members booking over 16,000 sessions. Sharp's own announcement gives a higher department count, above 115. The conservative figure captures the scale of the reported network without pretending the two versions are identical. Bookings indicate demand for time with a coach; the announcement supplies no independently audited outcome or retention data.

Andreessen Horowitz returns after leading Sharp's earlier $12M seed financing, documented in the company's historical announcement shared on Ben Curley's account. The Series A's lead investor, Hidden Variable, is backing a service whose capacity depends on the coaches it can recruit and retain. Sharp has not disclosed a valuation or investor check sizes. The $30M figure is cumulative funding, including the new round.

The Buyer and the Person Using the Benefit

Sharp's confidentiality policy makes a useful distinction for a chief evaluating the service. Departments receive quarterly aggregate information covering onboarding, engagement, session volume, satisfaction and broad themes. They do not receive individual coaching reports identifying who is coaching, how often they meet or what they discuss. Safety and legal limits apply, so confidentiality should be understood through those stated boundaries.

That arrangement gives the buyer a way to assess participation while giving the member a reason to speak candidly. The commercial interpretation is that reporting design influences the value of the relationship itself. A department could buy an excellent roster of coaches and still struggle with adoption if members thought their conversations were flowing back to a supervisor. The separation has to remain understandable through onboarding, everyday use and a difficult moment.

Sharp describes its coaches as people with first-responder or special-operations backgrounds who work outside the department. Familiarity with the work gives the conversation a starting point; organizational distance changes who is in the conversation. For leaders buying workforce support, those are separate requirements. A service has to make sense to the officer or firefighter who opens the app as well as the official reviewing the budget.

Human Coaching Inside a Technology Business

Sharp's member FAQ describes 30-minute, one-on-one sessions by video or phone, with members choosing their cadence and no session cap. An initial conversation with a coach-matching expert helps establish a fit, and members can change coaches. The department covers the member's cost under its agreement. Spouses and retirees can also have their own coaching relationships.

The product follows a career that changes shape. A promotion, return from leave, family transition or retirement can create a different reason to call than the one that brought the member into coaching. Keeping a primary relationship while adding specialist expertise gives Sharp a way to serve those changes without asking the member to rebuild the entire introduction. The app organizes access, exercises and resources around that continuing relationship.

Sharp explicitly positions coaching alongside clinical care, employee-assistance programs and department peer support. Its service does not provide diagnosis or a treatment plan, and departments keep their existing resources. That scope matters to the buying decision: the platform is offering another route into support, with its own role and limits. The reporting and referral boundaries are part of what a department needs to understand before rollout.

Expanding the Network Without Losing the Fit

The founders have been developing this business for several years. Columbia Entrepreneurship's 2023 Startup Lab cohort listed Benjamin Curley and Andrew Sakmar with Sharp Performance, describing a platform for high-risk professions. Sharp's current careers page describes a distributed team working from Carlsbad and across the country, with coaching, customer success, partnerships, product and engineering all contributing to delivery.

Growth in this model brings a practical obligation: a larger network needs enough appropriate coaches, appointment availability and implementation support to preserve the fit members were promised. A roster can become more varied as departments join, but the useful match still happens person by person. The opportunity for software is to make that relationship easier to begin and sustain without making it feel interchangeable.

Sharp's next department rollout therefore carries several decisions into the same room. A chief has to explain the purchase, a coach has to understand the profession, and a member has to know where the conversation will stop traveling. The new financing gives Curley and Sakmar resources to bring that arrangement to more people, with each new introduction depending on how clearly those boundaries hold.