
The IFIT Solutions founder spent a decade learning how talent moves between countries. A $4.6 million deal gave him a new brief: turn that operating knowledge into an AI-enabled HR business.
eQ8 is a Sydney-based SaaS company building a dedicated end-to-end platform for Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP). Founded by Alicia Roach and Chris Hare, the platform lets organizations model dynamic scenarios, forecast the size, shape and skills of the workforce they will need, identify skills gaps, and align talent decisions with business strategy. Its stated mission is to democratize strategic workforce planning so it is accessible to any organization, not just those able to afford lengthy consulting engagements.
Will Kramer is the CEO and co-founder of Laila Technologies, a Buffalo, New York startup building HireGPT, an AI recruitment platform that pairs a marketplace of expert tech recruiters with AI agents to screen, evaluate, and match candidates. A Cornell graduate with more than two decades of software development experience, including leadership roles at startups and Fortune 500 firms such as Paychex, he says HireGPT processes over 50,000 technical applications a month and has helped companies cut hiring costs and timelines by more than half. He also mentors founders at the University at Buffalo and runs plain-English AI workshops for small business owners.
OneRange is a New York-based HR-tech company building a skills-first talent growth platform. It connects employees' career goals to in-demand skills, then uses AI to match them with the right learning resource from a marketplace of 22,000+ options - courses, books, conferences, certifications - while giving employers usage-based pricing, automated approvals, virtual payment cards, and real-time skill and spend analytics. The pitch: pay only for the learning people actually use, and put employees in the driver's seat of their own development.
Steve Gilman is the co-founder and CEO of OneRange, a New York-based AI-powered upskilling platform that lets employees discover, get approval for, and buy the learning resources they need, with companies paying only when people actually learn. Before software, Gilman was drafted by the Detroit Tigers out of Yale and then served as a Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer working counterproliferation missions out of US embassies in Cairo and Abu Dhabi. He frames OneRange as importing the world-class skill-development methods of pro sports and the military into the corporate world, and the company now works with 25-plus enterprises including Google, Wasserman, and Caylent.