Exit

IDENTITY RESOLUTION NOTE: Database row 10011382 arrived with a corrupted "name" field reading "Exit Acq by Workday" and a "website" field of "workday.com" — an apparent data-import artifact that looked, at first glance, like the profile of some third startup whose real name/site had been overwritten with a description of its acquisition by Workday, Inc. To resolve this, I (1) pulled Workday's full acquisitions list from Wikipedia (22 deals from CapeClear in 2008 through Sana/Paradox/Flowise in 2025), and (2) cross-referenced every one of those acquired-company names against Greylock Partners' own live portfolio page (greylock.com/portfolio), which embeds a structured JSON dataset of ~178 current and historical portfolio companies with investor and status metadata. None of Workday's 22 acquisition targets (Adaptive Insights, VNDLY, Peakon, HiredScore, Scout RFP, Rallyteam, SkipFlag, Platfora, Identified, CapeClear, etc.) appear anywhere in Greylock's portfolio listing, and public reporting on each of those deals (TechCrunch, ZDNet, VentureBeat, Forbes) shows different investor syndicates (e.g., VNDLY was backed by Insight Partners; Pattern by Felicis/SoftTech VC/First Round; Identified by VantagePoint/Capricorn/Draper/Innovation Endeavors) with no Greylock involvement. By contrast, Workday itself IS explicitly listed on Greylock's own portfolio site — greylock.com/portfolio/workday/ — with "First Partnered: Seed," "Current Status: Public," and "Investors: Aneel Bhusri." Wikipedia and a contemporaneous 2009 Forbes article ("Duffield Scores Biggest Round") independently confirm that Workday was "initially funded by David Duffield and the venture capital firm Greylock Partners," and that Greylock (along with Duffield) participated again in Workday's $75M NEA-led round in 2009. I therefore conclude with high confidence that this database entry is meant to represent Workday, Inc. itself as a genuine, verified Greylock portfolio company — not a different, smaller startup that Workday acquired. The "Exit Acq by Workday" name is best explained as a template/join bug (e.g., an "exit event" label mistakenly generated for or attached to Workday's own row) rather than evidence of a distinct hidden company; there is no factual basis for treating Workday as "acquired" — it remains an independent, publicly traded company (NASDAQ: WDAY), so the schema's default acquisition/subsidiary framing does not actually apply here and has been overridden below with Workday's real status.

Workday was founded in March 2005 by David Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, both PeopleSoft veterans, shortly after Oracle completed its hostile takeover of PeopleSoft in 2004-2005. Duffield had founded and led PeopleSoft into the second-largest applications software company in the world before losing it to Oracle in a bitter takeover fight; Bhusri had joined PeopleSoft in 1993 and risen to vice chairman. The two set out to build a modern, multi-tenant, cloud-delivered alternative to legacy on-premise ERP and HR systems, initially self-funding the company alongside an early investment from Greylock Partners. Workday launched its product in November 2006 and moved its headquarters to Pleasanton, California — the same city where PeopleSoft had been based — in December 2008.

The company grew steadily through the late 2000s, signing marquee customers such as Flextronics (in what was described at the time as the software industry's biggest SaaS deal), Aviva, and Chiquita Brands, and raising a $75 million round led by New Enterprise Associates in April 2009 (with Greylock and Duffield participating) followed by an $85 million round in October 2011 at roughly a $2 billion valuation, backed by T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Janus, and Bezos Expeditions, bringing total capital raised to about $250 million. Workday went public on NASDAQ under ticker WDAY on October 12, 2012, pricing at $28 per share, selling 22.75 million Class A shares to raise $637 million, and closing its first trading day up 74% at $48.69 — a market capitalization of roughly $9.5 billion, at the time the largest U.S. tech IPO since Facebook.

Business model

Enterprise SaaS sold primarily via annual/multi-year subscription contracts to mid-size and large (including Fortune 500) organizations, delivered as a single unified cloud platform ("one codebase") for HCM, financial management, planning, and related applications, supplemented by professional services and an ISV/partner marketplace (Workday Extend, Workday Ventures ecosystem).

Subscription revenue (the large majority of total revenue) from HCM, financial management, planning, and other cloud application subscriptions, plus smaller professional services revenue for implementation, integration, and training.