Kanjoya Inc.
TypePrivately Held Company
IndustryHuman Capital Management
Sentiment Analysis
Employee Engagement
Founded2006
FateAcquired by Ultimate Software
HeadquartersSan Francisco, California
Key people
Websitekanjoya.com

Kanjoya was an enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that developed natural language processing (NLP) based artificial intelligence to understand, measure, and improve customer and employee experience. Founded in 2006 by Armen Berjikly, the company was acquired by Ultimate Software in 2016.[2][3]

History

Headquartered in San Francisco, Kanjoya's vision was to deliver "empathy through technology."[4] The company's core intellectual property was a significant advance in sentiment analysis enabling real-time recognition of over 100 human emotions in written text, with greater accuracy than could be expected of human analysts.[5]

In its development phase, preliminary applications of Kanjoya's technology included measuring the emotional reaction of audiences during political debates,[6] understanding how advertisements made consumers feel,[7] and analyzing consumer sentiment to successfully predict future actions of the Federal Reserve Board.[8]

Eventually, Kanjoya focused product development on understanding employee sentiment in the workplace,[9] through inputs including open-ended survey questions and performance reviews.

Berjikly noted:

"The area that we thought we could make the most impact, where people were the least understood, but yet affected the biggest part of their lives was [the] employee world.[10]"

Products

At the time of its acquisition, Kanjoya marketed three software-as-a-service offerings:

  • Perception to conduct employee surveys, analyze the results, and distribute results to managers[11]
  • Perception for Performance to evaluate, develop, and motivate employees[12][13]
  • Perception for Diversity and Inclusion to diagnose conscious and unconscious bias in the workplace[14][15]

All solutions focussed on understanding employee's qualitative feedback in addition to more traditional quantitative insights.[16]

Recognitions

Kanjoya was awarded Awesome New Startup at the 2015 HR Technology Conference;[17] and named Gartner's “Cool Vendor in Human Capital Management, 2016.[18]” In a research partnership with the Federal Reserve Board, it was shown that Kanjoya's technology "outperforms the University of Michigan index of consumer sentiment for predicting macroeconomic series such as output and unemployment.[19]"

References

  1. ↑ Berjikly, Armen. "Armen Berjikly". Entrepreneur. Retrieved 2020-07-17.
  2. ↑ "BRIEF-Ultimate Software acquires cloud workforce intelligence..." Reuters. 2016-09-30. Retrieved 2018-12-13.
  3. ↑ Bersin, Josh. "A New Wave Of HR Technology Consolidation Begins". Forbes. Retrieved 2019-02-28.
  4. ↑ Berjikly, Armen (2018-10-15). "How to Make Your Startup's Acquisition a Beginning, Not an End". Entrepreneur. Retrieved 2018-12-13.
  5. ↑ "How big data can take the pain out of performance reviews". Fortune. Retrieved 2018-12-13.
  6. ↑ Garvey, Megan (2012-01-21). "What sentiment analysis can and cannot tell us about the GOP race". Los Angeles Times. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved 2018-12-13.
  7. ↑ "Madonna's Super Bowl halftime show divides Twitter". LA Times Blogs - Show Tracker. 2012-02-05. Retrieved 2018-12-13.
  8. ↑ "Measuring News Sentiment" (PDF). Federal Reserve Board, San Francisco. 2017-03-01. Retrieved 2018-12-11.
  9. ↑ "Office gossips, be warned. Yammer now tracks office-wide emotions". VentureBeat. 2012-08-03. Retrieved 2019-02-28.
  10. ↑ Giang, Vivian (2015-05-05). "The Growing Business Of Detecting Unconscious Bias". Fast Company. Retrieved 2018-12-13.
  11. ↑ Waddell, Kaveh (2016-09-29). "The Algorithms That Tell Bosses How Employees Are Feeling". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2019-02-28.
  12. ↑ "How big data can take the pain out of performance reviews". Fortune. Retrieved 2019-02-28.
  13. ↑ "Machine learning drives Kanjoya performance review software". SearchHRSoftware. Retrieved 2019-02-28.
  14. ↑ "Tinder, But For Diversity: Can Code Help Silicon Valley Find And Retain Minority Engineers?". International Business Times. 2015-10-14. Retrieved 2018-12-13.
  15. ↑ Giang, Vivian (2015-05-05). "The Growing Business Of Detecting Unconscious Bias". Fast Company. Retrieved 2019-02-28.
  16. ↑ "Company Overview of Kanjoya, Inc". Bloomberg. 2008-12-12. Retrieved 2008-12-12.
  17. ↑ "HR Tech 2015: Awesome New HR Startups You Need to Know About". ERE Media. 2015-10-19. Retrieved 2018-12-13.
  18. ↑ "Cool Vendors in Human Capital Management, 2016". www.gartner.com. Retrieved 2018-12-13.
  19. ↑ Hollrah, Christopher; Sinha, Nitish Ranjan; Sharpe, Steven A. (2017-11-03). "What's the Story? A New Perspective on the Value of Economic Forecasts". Rochester, NY. SSRN 3065486. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
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