Tanya
Bakalov

Tanya Bakalov runs a Boston software company called HelloTeam, and the thing she is selling is, in a sense, regret. Not hers - yours. The regret of a manager who looks at a resignation letter and realizes every signal was there for months and nobody was reading them. HelloTeam bundles performance reviews, employee recognition, surveys, org charts, and the small human rituals of work - birthdays, anniversaries, milestones - into a single platform, and then it tries to tell you who is about to leave before they do. Bakalov describes the product plainly: it takes "performance management and employee engagement into one platform focused on keeping employees happy, productive, and staying." The last word is the whole business.

She founded the company in 2016, originally incorporating it as BetterSkills, Inc., and she did it from a specific vantage point that most HR-software founders do not have. Before HelloTeam, Bakalov was the Chief People Officer at a company worth a billion dollars. She had sat in the seat, run the people function at scale, and felt the particular frustration of having enormous responsibility for retention and almost no tooling to see around corners. HelloTeam is the software she wanted and could not buy.

"I quickly realized that in order to build a great company, it takes a great team."

That billion-dollar company was SevOne, and it is the reason anyone took her second act seriously. In 2005 Bakalov left a senior consultant post at Deloitte & Touche to co-found SevOne with her husband, Vess Bakalov. It was a network and digital-infrastructure monitoring company, and the two of them grew it from three people to more than 500 employees worldwide, with annual revenue approaching $100 million. She served as COO and Chief People Officer - the operator and the people person at once, which is a useful pair of hats to have worn if your next company is going to be about operations and people. SevOne was later acquired by Turbonomic, which IBM in turn folded into its own portfolio.

Building a company with your spouse and scaling it into the hundreds of employees is the kind of thing people write books about surviving. Bakalov did it and then, notably, did not retire on it. The interesting decision in her career is not the first company. It is the choice, after the first company worked, to start from zero again with a new problem.

"You have to believe in yourself, and keep moving your goals to find success."

The origin, of course, runs further back than Delaware. Bakalov is a Bulgarian immigrant. She studied at the University of Delaware's Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, graduating in 2004 with a double major in accounting and management information systems, and she became a licensed CPA. It is an unusual founder résumé - the accountant's discipline underneath the people-operations pitch - and it shows up in how she talks about her product, which is less about culture as a vibe and more about culture as something you can instrument, measure, and act on. She has stayed close to the school, serving on the Horn Entrepreneurship National Advisory Board, and in 2016 the college gave her its Alumni Award of Excellence.

2016 was a good year for hardware of that kind. Bakalov won the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award for New England, was interviewed by NECN News about it, and launched the venture that would become HelloTeam. A year later the University of Delaware handed HelloTeam its 17&43 award for Most Promising Venture. The awards are the sort of thing a founder collects; the more telling detail is what she did with the company when the world stopped.

In the spring of 2020, as companies scrambled and internship programs quietly got canceled, Bakalov launched an initiative called #InternsMatter and gave HelloTeam away free to internship programs. She paired it with discounted pricing, staff training, and webinars for HR professionals trying to hold remote teams together. "There is simply no question that it is a trying time to be a CEO," she said then, which is the sort of understatement that lands differently coming from someone who had already run the people function through a company's growth from three to 500. Giving software away during a crisis is either marketing or conviction; the fact that it targeted interns, the least monetizable users imaginable, suggests the latter.

The validation that matters most in startups is usually the one attached to a check. In 2022, HelloTeam closed a $10 million Series A, and $7 million of it came from Tom Golisano - the billionaire who founded the payroll giant Paychex, is worth roughly $5 billion by Forbes' count, and once ran for governor of New York. He invested through his firm Grand Oaks Capital. Bakalov called him "a true legend in the human resources space," which, if you are building HR software, is roughly the ideal person to have anchor your round. Forbes covered the deal in April 2023 under a headline about a payroll billionaire betting on an employee-retention startup. The company had 37 employees at the time and single-digit-millions revenue - small, but with results that were easy to point at.

Those results are the pitch. One client, Onyx CenterSource, reported saving "north of $4 million per year" while cutting turnover by a third. HelloTeam's customer list has included recognizable names - Netflix's The Home Edit production, Precision AI - and the company landed at #595 on the 2023 Inc. 5000. In early 2025, Inc. named Bakalov to its Female Founders 500 list, citing 375% growth and roughly $4 million saved for clients. The numbers are not enormous by unicorn standards. They are the numbers of a company that is actually working, run by someone who has done this before and is not in a hurry to pretend otherwise.

What comes next is the part everyone in software is doing, but Bakalov has a cleaner reason to do it than most. She wants to point artificial intelligence at retention - to take the engagement and performance data HelloTeam already collects and turn it into a forecast of who is disengaging and who is at risk of walking. It is, in a way, the completed version of the original idea: the Chief People Officer who could not see around corners, building the tool that finally can. Whether the AI delivers is an open question. The thesis - that the signals of a departure exist long before the resignation letter - is the same one she has believed since she sat in the seat herself.