Toronto-based employee SaaS company WorkTango has been acquired by Kazoo, an American company that provides an employee experience platform.
Co-founded by serial entrepreneurs Rob Catalano and Nadir Ebrahim, WorkTango is a people analytics company that offers an employee listening platform. Using data science and natural language understanding, the platform creates a space for workers to provide feedback on their employers’ operations. WorkTango converts the collected feedback into actionable insights for a company’s HR department, executives, and management.
Under a combined entity, Kazoo and WorkTango will continue to support more than 1,000 users globally.
Prior to creating WorkTango, Catalano and Ebrahim were early employees of HR tech company Achievers (founded by Elevate Tech Festival creator Razor Suleman). With this experience, as well as the co-founders’ cumulative 25 years in the HR tech and advisory experience space, Catalano and Ebrahim saw an opportunity to improve the engagement and performance practices in companies.
Since its inception in 2015, Bjarke Jungberg Grouleff joined as its third co-founder and technology lead to build the software. The company expanded its workforce, with employees in offices around the world including Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, Copenhagen, Rio de Janeiro, New Zealand, and London (Canada and United Kingdom).
As a result of the acquisition, Catalano and Ebrahim will join Kazoo’s executive team as chief strategy and marketing officer, and chief product officer, respectively. Grouleff will join the Kazoo technology team as chief architect.
Kazoo also plans on expanding its capabilities with WorkTango’s employee listening solution, and using the latter’s expertise in data, analytics, and artificial intelligence to gain a better understanding of an employee’s day-to-day experience.
Under a combined entity, Kazoo and WorkTango will support more than 1,000 users globally, ranging from small and midsize businesses to global Fortune 100 enterprises, such as Kia of North America, LogicMonitor, Bluetooth, and the National Basketball Association’s Brooklyn Nets.
Founded in 2013, Texas-headquartered Kazoo has developed an employee experience system designed to engage employees, as well as increase productivity and business performance. Kazoo’s technology combines objectives and key results, recognition, feedback, conversations, and incentives all into-one platform. The company claims a customer base of over 600 companies, which includes brands such as Patagonia and Habitat for Humanity.
Kazoo and WorkTango said they will initially operate their platforms individually as both firms work to fully integrate their teams and solutions.
RELATED: Influitive acquires PostBeyond to expand customer advocacy platform to employees
WorkTango’s acquisition follows a series of other HR tech consolidations in the Canadian playing field.
In December, Toronto-based Influitive acquired PostBeyond, also a Toronto company. PostBeyond’s software is focused on employee advocacy and social selling. Team management and productivity SaaS firm Tempo Software also acquired roadmap visualization platform Roadmunk just a month before.
Featured image from WorkTango
