workforce-engagement
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The Dashboard Was Right. The Employee Was Still Stuck.
Centrical began with a simple irritation: companies could measure frontline work but struggled to improve it. Its answer is a loop that turns a number on a screen into practice, coaching and a second look at the result.
The Safety Company That Knows Your Training Is Already Fading
Intertek Catalyst built a business around an awkward fact: the safety lesson everyone understood on Monday may be gone by Friday. Its answer is part agency, part classroom and part behavioral nudge - repeated until the right action becomes habit.
Klaus Put Every Support Ticket on the Witness Stand
The cat mascot retired. Its sharpest idea did not: read every customer conversation, find the ones that matter, and turn quality assurance from spreadsheet archaeology into a working feedback loop.
Aspect Software Came Back From the Dead. Now It Wants to Schedule Humans and AI
The call-center pioneer survived a $1 billion merger, a $380 million debt reset and a three-year disappearance inside Alvaria. Its second act is less about answering phones than deciding who - or what - should handle the work.
Dave Rennyson Built a Career Listening to the Calls Nobody Else Heard
Before AI learned to talk, Dave Rennyson spent decades learning how companies listen. His playbook is disarmingly practical: join the data, coach the people, and never let the dashboard become the work.
Alvaria and UJET Wire AI Calling to a 50-Year-Old Dialer
Two contact-center companies - one built on decades of compliant outbound dialing, the other on AI-first cloud - are stitching their stacks together. The bet is simple: enterprises want the smart part without the legal risk.
Alvaria
Born from the 2021 merger of two contact center veterans with roots going back to 1973, Alvaria builds the compliance-first outreach software that banks, insurers, healthcare providers and collections firms use to call, text and email millions of customers without breaking the rules.
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.
Gratia Health
Gratia Health is an Austin-based health-tech startup that turns everyday clinical work into measurable results. Its Workforce Activation Platform uses behavioral-science-designed incentives, real-time recognition, and gamification - points, badges, streaks, and patient shoutouts - to help hospitals keep nurses engaged, cover shifts, and cut spending on expensive contract labor. Emerged from stealth in November 2023 with seed funding led by JumpStart Capital and a launch partnership with ScionHealth's 70-plus specialty hospitals.
Shawn Dastmalchi
Shawn Dastmalchi is a serial healthcare-technology entrepreneur and the CEO of Gratia Health, an Austin-based startup that uses behavioral science and incentive design to keep nurses on the job. A UC Berkeley PhD in vision science, he co-founded and led Apixio, a clinical big-data company later acquired by Centene, then built Ark.one Health out of an entrepreneur-in-residence stint at Sutter Health. Across 25-plus years in life sciences, medical devices and health IT, his throughline is turning messy clinical data into decisions - and, at Gratia, turning the daily grind of a hospital floor into reasons for nurses to stay.
Verint
Verint is a Melville, New York-based enterprise software company that builds an open platform of AI-powered bots for customer experience (CX) automation. Its software analyzes behavioral and interaction data from contact centers, back offices, branches, websites and mobile apps to automate manual workflows, boost agent capacity and improve self-service. More than 80 of the Fortune 100 use Verint, and in 2025 the company agreed to be taken private by Thoma Bravo for roughly $2 billion.
Dave Rhodes
Dave Rhodes is the Chief Executive Officer of Verint, the AI-driven customer experience automation company formed through the combination of Verint and Calabrio under Thoma Bravo. A career software executive, Rhodes spent 11 years at Autodesk as VP of the Americas before joining Unity Software as Chief Revenue Officer — where he scaled revenue from $130M to $600M — and later as SVP/GM of the Digital Twins business. He then served as CEO of Sauce Labs and CEO of Calabrio before taking the Verint helm in February 2026, leading one of the largest CX data sets in the world spanning workforce engagement, agentic AI, and customer analytics.