Waggl

Waggl was a workforce-engagement software company based in Sausalito, California, founded in 2014. Its platform crowdsourced employee comments and ideas in real time, allowing organizations to collect input from staff, surface it transparently to the wider workforce and have employees vote to prioritize which ideas should drive action. The company positioned the product as a way for leaders to obtain actionable insight from employees and to accelerate alignment and decision-making, and management described it internally as "a digital focus group at scale."

Common use cases included running a more frequent, practical alternative to the company town hall, particularly for teams distributed across time zones, and supporting leadership transitions — for example, a consumer packaged goods company with nearly 250,000 employees used Waggl so an incoming CEO could gather employee ideas on streamlining processes and reducing bureaucracy. CEO Michael Papay contrasted the approach with private-response polling tools such as SurveyMonkey, emphasizing that responses on Waggl are visible to all employees and then ranked by them.

Waggl was acquired by Perceptyx, a Temecula, California-based provider of enterprise employee surveys and people analytics, on July 14, 2021; the seller was venture investor First Analysis and the deal value was not disclosed.

Founding story

The three founders — Michael Papay, Drew Batshaw and Adam Tanner — met at the Sausalito office of Fort Hill Company, which built on-demand employee training systems and where Papay was the second employee, worked 14 years, opened the West Coast office in 2006 and became president and CEO. They started Waggl in 2014 around the idea that employees could supply firms with actionable intelligence if they were brought into the management conversation more effectively.

Business model

Waggl sold a subscription software platform to employers, which deployed it internally to gather and prioritize employee input; customers included large enterprises, among them a consumer packaged goods company with nearly 250,000 employees. As of August 2019 the company served roughly 130 customers and reported $4.4 million of revenue for the prior year.

Software revenue from organizational customers; reported revenue of $4.4 million in 2018 with management anticipating roughly 50% growth in 2019.

Traction

By August 2019 Waggl reported roughly 130 customers, 50 employees, $4.4 million in revenue for the prior year and three-year revenue growth of 2,482%, and had signaled it might pursue a larger funding round in 2020 without a set target.

Latest developments

On July 14, 2021, Perceptyx acquired Waggl from First Analysis, adding Waggl's real-time employee crowdsourcing capability to Perceptyx's enterprise survey and people analytics portfolio. The transaction followed Perceptyx's same-day acquisition of CultureIQ.