employee-experience
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Rajkumari Neogy Is Teaching Leaders to Read the Room Beneath the Room
The CEO of ibelong has spent three decades following a stubborn question through Silicon Valley: what changes when leaders treat connection as part of the operating system?
Adit Jain
He turned a failing chatbot app into an AI platform for 400 of the world's biggest companies. The pivot started with one number he could not ignore.
Vijay Yalamanchili
Vijay Yalamanchili is the founder and CEO of Keka HR, a Hyderabad-born HR and payroll software company he built after growing frustrated with the clunky HR tools on the market. An engineer by training with earlier startups behind him, he bootstrapped Keka for roughly six years before raising a $57 million round from WestBridge Capital in 2022, reported at the time as India's largest Series A for a SaaS company. Keka now serves thousands of organizations and processes payroll for millions of employees each month, built around a focus on employee experience and disciplined, profit-led growth.
Emily Mikailli
Emily Mikailli is the CHRO and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Signifyd, the commerce protection platform based in San Jose, California. A former lawyer who traded the bar for the tech industry, she has led People and Culture at Signifyd since 2016, scaling the company's global workforce nearly 5X in headcount and over 25X in annual recurring revenue across offices in San Jose, London, Belfast and New York. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, she is known for a candid, human-centric approach to building teams and serves as Vice Chair of the board at Parisi House on the Hill, a nonprofit supporting mothers and children affected by addiction.
Gaurav Saini
Gaurav Saini is the co-founder and Chief Customer Officer of ChangeEngine, a San Francisco AI platform that merges marketing and people operations so HR teams can run employee programs the way marketers run campaigns. A go-to-market and customer success operator, he has spent his career turning early-stage SaaS companies into scaling businesses, including senior growth roles at WorkSpan and UserVoice, and a stint co-founding the advisory firm GTM Venture Studio. At ChangeEngine he leads the charge to collapse the sprawl of HR point tools into one platform, often citing conversations with more than 100 HR teams as the source of the company's roadmap.
Ana-Maria Constantin
Ana-Maria Constantin is the CEO and co-founder of Cascade AI, a Bellevue-based startup building agentic AI that automates the grind of HR and back-office operations. A Harvard dual major in computer science and astrophysics who left Romania after high school, she spent five-plus years as a software engineer at Microsoft writing code that touched millions of users on Azure before deciding HR - the function that touches more lives than any other in a company - was the perfect place to point machine learning. She raised a $5.45M-plus seed round led by Google's Gradient Ventures with AlleyCorp, was named GeekWire's Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2024, and recognized as a 2025 Google Cloud Partner All-Star.
Dawn Klinghoffer
Dawn Klinghoffer is Vice President of HR Business Insights at Microsoft, where she leads people analytics for one of the world's largest technology companies. A mathematics major from Bucknell University who started as an actuary in Hartford, Connecticut, she joined Microsoft's fledgling people analytics team in 2003 and spent over 25 years turning HR data into strategic decisions. Her most recognized contribution: replacing the industry's standard 'employee engagement' metric with 'employee thriving' - a framework adopted by Microsoft in 2022 that has influenced HR practices globally and was published in Harvard Business Review.
Anand Prajapati
Anand Prajapati is Co-Founder and CTO of Leena AI, an enterprise agentic AI platform that deploys AI colleagues to automate back-office work across HR, IT, Finance, and Procurement. A graduate of IIT Delhi, Anand built Leena AI's technology from scratch after two earlier startup pivots, guiding the company through Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch to a $30M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Today Leena AI's platform serves 400+ enterprise customers across 90+ countries - including Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Sony - resolving millions of employee queries autonomously across 100+ languages.
Andrew Higashi
Andrew Higashi is the Co-founder and CEO of ChangeEngine, a San Francisco-based AI-powered employee experience platform that helps companies communicate with and engage their people the way the best brands engage customers. A three-time company builder, he spent a decade honing enterprise sales and go-to-market strategy at Gigya, WorkSpan, and Sendoso before founding ChangeEngine in 2021 with the same co-founding team he has worked alongside for ten years. ChangeEngine has raised $15.5 million in total funding, including a $10 million Series A led by Threshold Ventures in 2024, and serves 310+ employees globally with operations in the US, UK, and Latin America.
Dhiraj Sharma
Dhiraj Sharma is the Founder and CEO of Simpplr, the AI-powered employee experience platform that has raised $139M across four funding rounds, including a $70M Series D in 2023. A serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience, he previously founded Simplion Technologies and Lirik Inc. before co-founding Simpplr in 2014. Under his leadership, Simpplr has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Intranet Packaged Solutions, the Forrester Wave for Intranet Platforms, and the IDC MarketScape for Integrated Employee Workspaces, building a platform designed to make work more human for hundreds of enterprise clients.
Kaushik Arakalgud
Kaushik Arakalgud is a technology entrepreneur and builder based in Bengaluru, India, currently working in AI at Domestika - the global creative learning platform that reached unicorn status with a $1.3B valuation in 2022. As Co-Founder and CTO of Aimwiser, an AI and neuroscience-powered people and wellness intelligence SaaS platform, he brings together his passion for education technology, artificial intelligence, and human development. Trained as a computer science engineer at PES College of Engineering, Kaushik has spent his career at the intersection of technology and meaningful societal impact.
Piyush Rajput
Piyush Rajput is the Co-Founder and SVP of Engineering at Simpplr, the AI-powered employee experience platform he helped build from the ground up in 2014. A civil engineering graduate from IIT Delhi, he pivoted to software and has spent 15+ years at the intersection of engineering and product - now overseeing the technology behind a platform serving 2 million+ employees at companies like Moderna, Penske, and the NHS. Simpplr has raised $139M+ in total funding and reached a Series D under his technical leadership.