performance-management
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Culture Amp wants your employee survey to have consequences
Thousands of companies use Culture Amp to ask employees what they think. Its next bet is AI that helps managers do something with the answers - while the company faces hard questions about its own workplace.
Talos360 wants to give hiring its lost days back
Wagamama cut 12 days from hiring with Talos ATS, according to its published customer story. Now Talos360 is taking its recruitment software into the rest of working life.
Totara Made ‘No’ the Most Expensive Word in Workplace Learning
Born from Moodle’s workplace blind spots, Totara bet that complex employers would pay for the freedom to alter the machinery. Fifteen years later, 1,500 organizations use that flexibility to train 21 million people - and the dullest parts of corporate learning have become its best argument.
The HR Software Company That Won a Customer Back From Oracle
Pilat spent decades making HR software bend to the customer. One enterprise tried the opposite, saw the compromises coming, and brought Pilat back.
The Weekly Check-In Grew a Brain
15Five began with one humane idea: ask people how work is going before the annual review arrives. Now it wants to turn that weekly pulse into an operating system for managers - AI included.
Allie Collins Is Making the Performance Review Face Real Life
After more than 15 years marketing SaaS, Betterworks CMO Allie Collins has arrived at a deceptively human thesis: work improves when managers get better signals, employees get timely conversations, and everyone stops pretending an annual form can remember the year for them.
Betterworks Learned the Hard Way: Goals Don’t Manage People - Managers Do
The enterprise software company started by making goals visible. Then its customers taught it the harder lesson: a dashboard cannot coach a person, so Betterworks rebuilt performance management around the conversations between the numbers.
Culture Amp or EmployeeXM Is Really a Bet on Scope
Culture Amp goes deep on the employee loop. Qualtrics EmployeeXM reaches across the enterprise - and the better choice depends on whether HR needs a focused operating system or a bridge to customer, product, and brand data.
Lattice and Culture Amp Built the Same Suite Backwards
The two people platforms now sell strikingly similar toolkits. Their opposite starting points still reveal which one belongs in your company.
Your Performance Software Is Quietly Choosing Your Management Style
Lattice and 15Five now overlap on nearly every feature. The useful difference is the behavior each platform makes easiest: running a connected talent system or coaching managers week by week.
Rypple Built an AI Coach for 15,000 Managers - Then Learned Advice Wasn’t Enough
Most leadership software gives managers another lesson and another login. Rypple’s bet is more practical: remember the people, prep the awkward meeting, track the promise - and charge less than lunch.
The HR Software Choice Hiding in Your Meeting Calendar
Culture Amp and 15Five overlap on features, but they organize work around different centers of gravity. The better choice starts with who owns the rhythm: HR running the system or managers living in it.
The One-Login Bet Behind Southeast Asia's HR Back Office
Payroll rules change at the border. Employee expectations do not. brioHR is building one regional operating layer for both - and betting that service matters as much as software.
Betterworks bets everything on OKRs. Lattice made them a footnote.
Two of the biggest names in performance software chose opposite religions. One organizes the whole product around goals. The other treats goals as just another tab, and built its empire on feedback instead.
One Startup Bets on Goals, the Other Owns the Money
Betterworks turned Google's goal-setting religion into enterprise software. Papaya Global decided the real leverage was in owning the payroll payment itself. Here is how the two HR-tech bets actually differ.
Your Performance Software Is Making a Management Bet
Lattice, 15Five and Betterworks all track goals, but they begin from different ideas about how people improve. The right choice depends less on a feature checklist than on the management rhythm your company will actually sustain.
palm.hr
palm.hr is a Riyadh-born, cloud-based HR and payroll platform built for small and mid-sized businesses across Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC. It brings employee data, time and attendance, WPS-compliant payroll, and employee engagement into one system that plugs directly into local government rails like GOSI and Mudad, so companies can run people operations that comply with regional labor law out of the box. Founded in 2019, it raised a $5M pre-Series A in 2023 to expand across MENA and pairs its software with an outsourced HR concierge service.
EngageRocket
EngageRocket is a Singapore-based HR technology company that turns continuous employee feedback into actionable people-analytics. Founded in 2016 by two former Gallup leaders, its cloud platform runs engagement, lifecycle and pulse surveys (BELONG), 360-degree and multi-rater feedback (GROW), and performance workflows (PERFORM), pairing survey software with people-science advisory. It serves enterprises across 30+ countries - including Toyota, Sephora, Nikon, Epson and CGS-CIMB - to improve engagement, reduce turnover and support data-informed HR decisions.
ZenHR
ZenHR is a cloud-based Human Resources Management System (HRMS) built specifically for the Middle East, North Africa and Gulf region. It automates payroll, attendance, onboarding, performance and recruitment while staying compliant with local labor laws, social insurance (GOSI), and wage protection (WPS) rules. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Riyadh, ZenHR serves companies from small businesses to large enterprises across markets including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and Iraq.
Tim Regnier
Tim Regnier is the CEO and co-founder of Smart Access, a frontline performance management software company he started in Edmonton, Alberta in 2015 and now runs from San Francisco. After nearly a decade running retail-tech ventures, Regnier built Smart Access to solve the visibility gap for managers on warehouse, manufacturing, and store floors, turning static SOPs into living documents and pairing them with AI-driven observations, coaching, and analytics. His guiding belief that 'all truth is found on the floor' has shaped a platform used by top retail and logistics enterprises, and the company raised a $12M Series A in 2026.
Flo
Flo (formerly Flo Recruit) is an Austin-based software company building the talent platform for the legal industry. It connects law firms, law schools, attorneys, and search firms through a connected suite of recruiting and performance-management tools - including an applicant tracking system, the Flo Forward career platform, pipeline building, and Flo AI. Founded in 2017 by University of Texas students Katherine Allen and Atreya Misra, the company works with roughly 70% of AmLaw 100 firms and 85% of the top 50 U.S. law schools.
HelloTeam
HelloTeam is a Boston-based HR technology company that builds an all-in-one employee engagement and performance management platform aimed at improving employee retention. Founded in 2016 by Tanya Bakalov, the software combines performance reviews, goals and OKRs, recognition and rewards, surveys, learning, a dynamic org chart, and people analytics into a single system so managers and HR teams can keep employees connected, engaged, and productive.
Leadr
Leadr is a Texas-based B2B SaaS company that builds continuous-performance software to help managers develop the people who report to them. Positioned as an operating system for managers, the platform brings 1-on-1 meetings, goal setting, feedback, engagement surveys, reviews and AI meeting tools into one place. Founded in 2019 by veterans of the church-tech unicorn Pushpay, Leadr raised a $10M Series A led by Bedrock and works toward a stated mission of developing one million leaders. Its customers span businesses, hospitals, nonprofits, churches and educational institutions.
Zencity
Zencity is a govtech company that builds the leading platform for community trust, purpose-built for local government. It combines AI-driven social listening, statistically representative resident surveys, and communication tools to help cities, counties, and public safety agencies understand what residents think and turn that input into decisions, budgets, and policy. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in New York and Tel Aviv, Zencity works with more than 600 government agencies and has raised roughly $93M in venture funding.
Keka HR
Keka HR is a cloud-based human resource, payroll and people-operations platform for small and mid-sized businesses. Founded in Hyderabad in 2014 by Vijay Yalamanchili, it bundles payroll, attendance, leave, performance, hiring and employee-engagement tools into a single self-serve system. After bootstrapping for years, Keka raised a $57 million Series A from WestBridge Capital in 2022 - reported as India's largest Series A in SaaS at the time - and now serves thousands of companies while processing payroll for more than a million employees each month.
Smart Access
Smart Access is an AI platform for frontline operations that closes the gap between how work is supposed to be done and how it actually gets done on the floor. Built for large retail, distribution, and logistics operations, it digitizes standard operating procedures, tracks frontline performance in real time, and turns floor-level observations into mobile coaching and skill-building for workers. Founded in 2015 by Tim Regnier and John White, the company raised a $12M Series A led by Lobby Capital.
WorkBoard
WorkBoard is a Redwood City-based enterprise SaaS company that builds an AI-native strategy execution and OKR platform. It helps large organizations set objectives and key results, align teams around them, automate business reviews, and track progress in real time so strategy turns into a repeatable 'operating rhythm.' Co-founded in 2014 by CEO Deidre Paknad and Daryoush Paknad, the company serves major enterprises including Boeing, 3M, Cisco, Capital One and Workday, and in 2025 acquired rival Quantive to consolidate the enterprise OKR market.
Tanya Bakalov
Tanya Bakalov is the CEO and founder of HelloTeam, a Boston-based employee engagement and performance management platform she started in 2016. A Bulgarian immigrant and University of Delaware accounting graduate, she left Deloitte in 2005 to co-found SevOne, the network monitoring company she scaled with her husband from three people to more than 500 employees and roughly $100M in revenue before its acquisition. A 2016 EY Entrepreneur of the Year and Inc. Female Founders 500 honoree, she raised a $10M Series A led in large part by payroll billionaire Tom Golisano and is pointing HelloTeam at AI-driven employee retention.
Nestor
Nestor is an AI-powered, skills-based talent management platform - a self-described People Intelligence Platform - that helps HR leaders, managers, and employees map, activate, and deploy the skills inside an organization. Built around a market library of 20,000+ skills and an AI companion, Nestor connects performance management, employee engagement, and career development so companies can spot skill gaps, run an internal talent marketplace, and make workforce decisions based on capability rather than job titles.
Paismo
Paismo is a people-first, AI-powered HR and payroll platform built for small and mid-sized businesses in emerging markets. Founded in 2022 by University of Pennsylvania alumni Rebecka Zavaleta and Usama Mahmud, it combines core HR, time and attendance, leave, performance management and automated payroll into one cloud system - with localized features designed from the ground up for markets that legacy HR software has long ignored. Backed by a $1.5M seed haul led by Indus Valley Capital, Paismo now spans the US, UAE, Pakistan, Mexico and Ethiopia, and has layered on Employer of Record services and a one-click payroll partnership with easypaisa.