workday
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HiredScore Sold the Queue-Cutting Machine Workday Needed for $530 Million
Athena Karp spent 11 years turning overloaded applicant tracking systems into ranked, explainable to-do lists. Workday's $530 million purchase shows the prize was never another HR database - it was the intelligence layer that makes the database move.
SonicJobs Wants to Kill the Redirect - the 12 Seconds Where Job Hunts Go to Die
Ninety-five percent of job seekers quit before they finish applying. SonicJobs built an AI agent to do the quitting-worthy part for them - and turned the recruitment industry's worst funnel into its pitch.
Insperity
Insperity built a $6.8 billion business by taking on the work small companies cannot afford to get wrong. Now its service-heavy PEO model is being rebuilt for a Workday world.
Lab0
Lab0 is a Y Combinator (P26) startup building AI forward-deployed engineers (AI FDEs) that automate the entire post-sales delivery process for enterprise software - discovery, configuration, integration, testing and go-live. By running these phases inside the systems customers already use, such as ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce, Workday and Jira, Lab0 aims to compress deployments that normally take six months into about ten days, turning consulting-heavy rollouts into a self-serve product.
Workday
Workday is a Pleasanton, California cloud software company that runs the core people and money systems for large organizations. Founded in 2005 by PeopleSoft veterans Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri after Oracle's hostile takeover of PeopleSoft, Workday built a single-code-base, subscription-delivered platform for human capital management, financial management, planning, and analytics. It has grown into one of the largest enterprise SaaS vendors, serving thousands of organizations - including a large share of the Fortune 500 - and is now pushing agentic AI deep into HR and finance workflows.
Cascade AI
Cascade AI is a Bellevue/Seattle-based startup building an agentic AI platform for HR and IT operations. Its AI teammates sit across systems of record like Workday, ADP, UKG and ServiceNow to answer employee questions and resolve requests across benefits, leave, compensation, policy and IT - executing workflows in real time rather than just surfacing information. Founded in 2022 by former Microsoft engineers Ana-Maria Constantin and Pulak Goyal, the company raised a $3.75M seed round led by Gradient, Google's AI-focused venture fund, and says customers see roughly a 50% drop in HR ticket volume after deployment.
Skillcentrix
Skillcentrix is a Boston-based consultancy and Workday services partner focused exclusively on helping Workday customers build skills-centric talent strategies. Founded in 2022, it advises, deploys, innovates and manages HR technology across the talent lifecycle - planning, acquisition, development, mobilization and retention - for enterprises modernizing their workforce.
Pipedream
Pipedream is a developer-first integration and automation platform that lets engineers connect more than 3,000 APIs and 10,000+ pre-built actions to build workflows, products, and AI agents without managing infrastructure. Founded in 2019 in San Francisco, it grew to more than one million users on the strength of a serverless model that mixes drag-and-drop triggers with full Node.js, Python, Go, and Bash code. In 2025 it became the connective tissue for AI agents through its Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and in late 2025 it agreed to be acquired by Workday.
Rain
Rain is a Santa Monica fintech that lets employees tap the wages they've already earned before payday. It plugs directly into employer payroll and time-and-attendance systems to calculate real-time earnings, then pairs instant access with budgeting tools, free tax filing, financial coaching, an AI financial assistant and a debit card. Since 2019 it has reached over 3.5 million workers and moved more than $2 billion in wages, positioning earned wage access as an employer benefit that cuts turnover and financial stress.
WalkWater Technologies
WalkWater Technologies is a San Jose-based IT services and consulting firm founded in 2010. It began as an ERP and CRM system integrator specializing in Oracle, SAP, Workday, and Salesforce, and has grown into a cloud-first practice spanning cloud migration, AI/ML, data analytics, ServiceNow, and Oracle Cloud IoT. An Oracle Gold Partner and Google Cloud partner, WalkWater helps enterprises 'make the cloud yours' by ingesting, curating, visualizing, and monetizing data as a strategic asset.
Atom
Atom is a San Francisco-based enterprise transformation company that helps mid-size and Fortune 500 organizations move to the cloud and modernize on platforms like Oracle, Salesforce, Workday, SAP and ServiceNow. Founded in 2020 by Zain Aziz, it pitches an asset-based 'Living Services' model with packaged accelerators (Atom CORE) that compress traditional multi-year transformations into 3-6 month rollouts.