The clue arrived as a contradiction. Ben Reuveni worked at IBM, one of the largest technology companies in the world, yet the next move in his career was easier to imagine outside the building than inside it. Recruiters could find him. The organization around him could not easily show where else his skills might fit. When he approached HR about moving internally, the conversation felt less like career exploration and more like an alarm: Was he unhappy? Was he leaving? Why was this coming up now?
For Reuveni, the awkwardness exposed a structural bug. A large company could know a person's title, manager and compensation while remaining strangely incurious about the projects they might thrive on next. Opportunity traveled through networks and departmental borders. A résumé explained the past. An org chart described the present. Neither offered much help with the future.
That gap became Gloat, the company Reuveni founded in 2015 with two fellow engineers, Amichai Schreiber and Danny Shteinberg. Gloat has changed its product language several times since then: external career marketplace, internal talent marketplace, workforce agility platform, work orchestration system, agentic HR. Beneath the vocabulary sits one persistent idea. A person's job is a narrow snapshot of their capacity, and a company should not have to lose them before discovering what else they can do.
A side project with a long shadow
The question had been following Reuveni for years. His interest in computers began in the early 1990s, when his father brought one home for university research. Reuveni later recalled that while friends played soccer, he was thinking through a productivity app on a multi-room chat platform. It is a neat childhood detail because it contains both halves of his later work: code, and an interest in how people coordinate.
During his service in an Israeli technological intelligence unit, a boss asked him to spend 10 percent of his time improving an algorithm used to find talent. The assignment was technically interesting, but its personal effect mattered just as much. Reuveni felt happier and more creative when part of his week was pointed toward work he loved. He later described the experience in four words: “It changed my life.”
The algorithm was not yet a company. It was a demonstration. Put better information around a person and a need, and both sides may see a fit that hierarchy misses. Reuveni, who calls matchmaking a way of life, even jokes that several friends have him to thank for their marriages. The founder biography and the product thesis overlap unusually well. He likes the moment when two things that seemed separate suddenly make sense together.
“Our entire philosophy is that people are everything.”Ben Reuveni on Gloat's operating culture
The algorithm that found the pivot
After his intelligence service, Reuveni joined a storage startup that IBM acquired. He spent about six years at IBM, including as a solutions architect, and met Schreiber there. The company offered scale and technical depth, but moving across it felt opaque. Reuveni and Schreiber left to build a system that would use data and algorithms to help people navigate their careers. Shteinberg joined them as a co-founder.
Their first version looked outward. Originally called Workey, the service matched people with opportunities at other companies. Then the recommendations began delivering an inconvenient insight. Roughly half the time, the next logical step could exist inside the candidate's current employer. The talent was not necessarily in the wrong company. It was on the wrong map.
Gloat turned inward. Instead of helping employers poach from one another, it would help employees discover projects, full-time roles, mentors and learning opportunities behind their own corporate walls. A manager with an urgent project could look beyond the usual names. An employee could express an aspiration without first announcing an exit. The product would create a market where a hierarchy had previously rationed visibility.
Where could I leave?
Where can I grow here?
What can the system help do?
The pivot also changed the difficulty of the business. Consumer matching could be built at the edge of an organization. An internal marketplace had to enter the core. It needed integrations, governance and the confidence of enterprises that do not casually hand a startup access to workforce data. Reuveni found that large companies were not inherently late adopters. Their problems were large enough to justify an unfamiliar solution, provided the startup behaved as a partner and not merely a vendor.
Unilever became a formative customer. Gloat has said its marketplace helped the company direct more than 750,000 hours toward over 4,000 projects. Schneider Electric registered more than 80,000 people and cut the time to discover a development opportunity from two weeks to as little as two minutes. During a period of disruption, Seagate used the marketplace to redeploy people toward areas of urgent demand. These are corporate metrics, but they point back to an intimate event: an employee seeing a door that was there all along.
A marketplace becomes infrastructure
The pandemic made internal movement less theoretical. Businesses needed to shift people from quieter units to overloaded ones, often without the time or access to hire externally. In 2021, Gloat raised a $57 million Series C led by Accel. A year later, Generation Investment Management led a $90 million Series D. The capital reflected a broader claim: internal mobility was moving from an employee benefit toward operating infrastructure.
Gloat then expanded beyond matching. Its workforce intelligence products tried to harmonize the messy language of skills across job descriptions, learning systems and employee profiles. The company's graph linked people, roles, projects and capabilities. The logic was practical. A marketplace is only as useful as its inventory. If the enterprise does not know what skills it has, recommendations will reproduce its blind spots.
Reuveni's own management comments echo the product. He has described culture as something assessed from the interview onward, held biweekly open Zoom meetings during remote growth, and said he seeks advice from experienced CEOs. Gloat even used its own marketplace to assemble the team behind its first live conference. The anecdote is small but telling: the product was meant to be an operating habit, not a showroom.
Use AI to connect career histories with jobs and possible next moves.
Unify skills, roles, projects and learning into a view leaders and employees can use.
Bring workforce agents into the communication tools where decisions already happen.
From recommending to doing
By 2025, Gloat was describing an Agile Workforce Operating System. Mosaic, announced that March, could break an objective into tasks, identify the required skills and suggest a mix of people and technology. A multi-ontology graph added work and technology to the existing map of skills. In September, a brand refresh organized the product around the “Exponential Workforce,” Reuveni's term for employees combining human judgment with AI capability.
In 2026 the framing shifted again, this time to agentic HR. Gloat's Loomra engine is designed to gather workforce context across systems, policies, skills and career paths so agents can reason about a request and take action. In April, the company made those capabilities available through Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams. The placement matters. Reuveni argues that HR software has historically required employees to visit it. His new premise is that the capability should come to the employee.
This is a larger ambition than an internal job board, and a more delicate one. Recommending a project is different from orchestrating a workforce decision. Skills inference can widen a person's options, but automated systems can also harden old assumptions, reward tidy data and make consequential judgments feel inevitable. Gloat publishes an ethical AI framework and describes governance, auditability and policy controls as part of Loomra. For Reuveni's thesis to hold, employee agency cannot be a decorative value. It has to survive the machinery built to help it.
A résumé is evidence. Reuveni's career-long argument is that it should not become a border.
The career map after the ladder
There is a personal symmetry in the work. The young engineer wanted a clearer view of where he could go inside IBM. The CEO now sells enterprises a system meant to answer that question for millions of employees. The objects on the map have multiplied - jobs, projects, mentors, skills, tasks, software and agents - but the unease underneath has barely changed. People are more complex than the systems that classify them.
Reuveni is not trying to restore a predictable corporate ladder. His language points toward lattices, adjacencies and careers assembled from varied experiences. The destination is a workplace where growth can be discovered continuously and where leaders can allocate talent with more than titles and personal familiarity. It is also a workplace that asks employees to trust algorithms with a more complete account of who they are and what they want.
That trade is the real story of Gloat's next decade. Visibility can create freedom, but only when the person remains more important than the profile. Reuveni learned the value of a good match from a 10 percent assignment. He learned the cost of a missing one inside IBM. Everything since has been an attempt to close the distance between those two moments - before someone has to look outside just to see a future.