Built by the same team, three times over
Andrew Higashi landed in California for high school after a childhood split between New Jersey, Orlando, and Singapore - he had moved to Singapore right around 9/11, which gives you a sense of the family's tolerance for disruption. He studied International Studies at UC Irvine, graduated in 2010 directly into the wreckage of the post-recession job market, and took the first interesting offer he could find: one of the very first BDR roles at a young company called Gigya.
Gigya built the external social graph - the layer that lets brands understand who their customers are across the web. Higashi watched Patrick Salyer (who would later become CEO) run the go-to-market playbook from close range. He absorbed it. Gigya eventually sold to SAP for hundreds of millions of dollars. Higashi had already moved on, but the Gigya years planted the seed for what would come later: if you could build that kind of identity and engagement infrastructure for customers, why couldn't you build it for employees?
He spent the next decade in enterprise sales and market expansion - VP of Enterprise Sales at WorkSpan, building the function from the ground up; VP of New Markets at Sendoso; co-founding GTM Venture Studio and investing through the Emerging Leaders Syndicate in companies like GoSite, Gappify, and Sales Impact Academy. He got extremely good at one specific thing: taking a product nobody had heard of into rooms where people had no reason to care, and making them care.
"Communication becomes the strongest bond - almost a spiritual bond - that we can develop."
- Andrew Higashi
In September 2021, he started ChangeEngine with Kes Thygesen, Gaurav Saini, and Rick Tank - the same team he had been building with for a decade. This was company number three for that group. That kind of founding continuity is unusual; most co-founder relationships fracture under the weight of the first company, let alone the third. It says something about how Higashi operates. His stated decision-making framework - "Can we collaborate to make this decision right?" - is not the language of someone who runs things by decree.
The company's thesis borrows directly from Gigya's logic, just flipped inward. Where Gigya mapped the external social graph, ChangeEngine maps what Higashi calls the "people graph" - the network of connections, moments, and communications that make up company culture. The platform gives HR and people teams the same capability stack that enterprise marketing teams use for customer campaigns: audience segmentation, AI-generated content, multi-channel delivery across Slack, Teams, email, and SMS, plus analytics to measure what lands.
The framing is deliberate. Most internal communication tools ask employees to log into yet another platform. ChangeEngine routes messages through systems employees already live in. Higashi's description of this as avoiding "log-in fatigue" undersells it slightly - the real argument is that an internal communication platform that requires a new login is already failing at its job.
ChangeEngine raised a $5.5 million seed round from Struck Capital, Bonfire Ventures, Builders VC, and Forward Partners, then closed a $10 million Series A in May 2024 led by Threshold Ventures, with Josh Stein and Adam Struck joining the board. Total funding sits at $15.5 million. Annual revenue runs around $9.9 million. The company operates in the US, UK, and Latin America with over 310 employees and integrates with 75+ HRIS platforms including Workday, BambooHR, and UKG.
Higashi draws his mental models from places you might not expect for a B2B SaaS CEO: Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth (read in college), Ray Dalio's Principles, and Stephen Covey's concept of the "speed of trust." The synthesis is a view of organizational communication as something more than information delivery - closer to what he calls a spiritual bond. Whether you buy that framing or not, ChangeEngine's customer roster suggests that enough HR leaders do.
Off the clock, Higashi runs marathons, plays guitar, dabbles in magic, and maintains what his own Twitter bio describes as a passion for keyboard shortcuts. He writes for Fast Company on corporate responsibility. He is the kind of person who has opinions about workflow optimization at every layer of his life.