Receptiviti, a Toronto-based corporate culture analytics company, has announced that data scientist and software engineer Alain Chesnais has joined the company as chief technology officer.
Chesnais has over 30 years of industry experience, holding technical leadership positions at Tucows, TruSpectra, ATI, and Alias|Wavefront. While at Alias|Wavefront, Chesnais spearheaded the development of 3D graphics application Maya, which received an Academy Award for scientific and technical achievement in 2003. Most recently, Chesnais co-founded Trendspottr, which was acquired by ScribbleLive in 2017.
Receptiviti helps companies create and maintain a healthy workplace culture by providing insights about the changing psychological states of their teams.
“Alain is passionate about bringing research to life through technology. He understands the complexity of building research-based products and has decades of experience developing programs that fundamentally change industries,” said Jonathan Kreindler, CEO of Receptiviti. “His unique background and experience in research, engineering, data science, and product development make him the perfect person to help us scale.”
Founded by Kreindler and Professor James W. Pennebaker, Receptiviti helps companies create and maintain a healthy workplace culture by providing insights about the changing psychological states of their teams. The platform integrates with corporate communications systems to provide real-time insights on stress, anxiety, engagement, and other predictive indicators of culture risk and workplace health.
In order to provide psychological insights without compromising individual privacy, the company said it has engineered privacy and anonymity as core structural elements of the platform. Its privacy-first approach is a major component of what drew Chesnais to Receptiviti. “Being able to do this type of in-depth analysis while still maintaining people’s privacy was something that I found remarkable,” Chesnais said. “I’ve worked in the space of language analytics before but had never come across a technology that could generate such valuable insights in a completely ethical way.”
“As we continue to focus on research, expanding our platform, making privacy and anonymity core tenets of our software, and of course, satisfying our customers, Alain’s considerable experience and wealth of knowledge in product engineering, design, and machine learning science will power our growth into 2019 and beyond,” said Kreindler.