It's been over a decade since One Model first emerged to reshape the People Analytics space.
When we started a People Analytics software company, we weren’t trying to ride a trend or repackage someone else’s ideas. We were responding to something we’d seen over and over again: People Analytics teams were being held back. Not by a lack of will or talent, but by the limitations of the tools and infrastructure available to them.
At the time, I was leading the North American data engineering team for the workforce analytics and planning product at SAP SuccessFactors, having joined through the acquisition of Infohrm—the first true People Analytics platform on the market. Alongside me were colleagues Matthew Wilton, a leading engineer at the time, and David Wilson, who was my peer for the EMEA region. We had all been deep in the trenches, working with global organizations that were desperate for better answers from their workforce data.
Every day, we heard customers asking for capabilities we couldn’t deliver—things the current stack simply wasn’t built to do. The industry was shifting. Data was moving to the cloud. Expectations were rising. But the tools hadn’t caught up, and the default answer was still “no.” No, we can’t connect that. No, that metric isn’t customizable. No, we just don’t do that.
That’s when I decided to step out and build what the industry really needed and was lucky enough to attract David and Matthew to join me.
So we set out to architect a platform that could finally give People Analytics teams the access, flexibility, transparency, and control they’d been asking for since the beginning of the discipline.
The idea started with a deceptively simple question: How do we help organizations modernize their data infrastructure and gain much greater insight into their workforce at the same time?
Back then, we were watching customers struggle through the move to the cloud, wrestling with disconnected data, and stuck in tools that couldn’t keep up. We knew the fix wasn’t a prettier dashboard—it was a complete rethink of the foundation. If you want to understand what One Model is, start with a team of frustrated analytics experts who decide to build their own solution rather than keep saying no. That’s how One Model began.
As Matt explains it, “If you want to solve a hard problem well, you have to start from the beginning. We made the decision early on to build a complete, extensible data model so our customers wouldn’t be trapped in a black box reporting layer forever.”
We couldn’t do that from inside a giant enterprise. So we left to put our own ideas into practice.
I stepped away from a very comfortable but ultimately unfulfilling job, moved to Austin, was accepted into the Techstars accelerator, and started building. We were scrappy but focused. And then came one of our first major inflection points: we beat Oracle for a large enterprise customer. That win didn’t come from feature parity. It came from trust, clarity, and expertise. We brought a People Analytics-first perspective to the table, and even with a limited product, we were able to demonstrate real value and partnership to our customer.
In this video, Dave Wilson, COO at One Model, shares what he's most excited about as One Model moves forward.
What’s made One Model work from day one is our refusal to take shortcuts when it comes to solving real problems. Our product philosophy has always been grounded in flexibility, transparency, and customer control. We didn’t build for what was easy to scale. We built for what actually works.
That approach has always made our sales process a little unusual. As Dave put it, “It was never just about building a tool. It was about partnering with people who wanted to do hard things – and keep getting better at them. Our clients grow with One Model. They bring new knowledge, new learning, and new insights to us as well.” That exchange—between us and our customers, and across our own teams – is part of what makes our platform different.
Even now, our best conversations with prospects sound more like whiteboard sessions than sales calls. We’re not trying to trap anyone in a funnel. We’re solving problems together. That transparency has been a core part of who we are since day one.
Some of the best decisions we made in those early years had nothing to do with code. One of them was hiring former People Analytics leaders into Customer Success. These were people who knew the politics, the pressure, and the work. We’ve always believed that real-world exposure is the best training ground. We gave them a platform to multiply their impact across dozens of customers.
One Model has always operated on the principle of inside-out HR innovation. Some of our most transformative features didn’t come from a roadmap brainstorm – they came from engineers, data scientists, or customer success leads who spotted a gap while working hands-on with customers and pushed to build something better.
That influence rippled through the rest of the company. As those team members moved into product, engineering, and data roles, they brought a deeper understanding of what customers actually need—not just what looks good in a spec. They made the product stronger.
Examples of this kind of HR innovation at One Model range from rethinking how metrics are constructed in the product, to implementing new onboarding frameworks for data ingestion, to being early to operationalize AI governance. Much of what we’re awarded for today started with someone inside the team saying, “My customer has a problem, what if we tried this?”
Today, we’re building faster than ever. Our early investment in predictive modeling and automated machine learning laid a critical foundation that allowed us to move quickly when generative AI emerged. Within weeks of the first major papers being released, we were already re-architecting parts of the company to respond. We didn’t just tack on AI as a feature. We retooled how we operate so we could do it right and drive to our thesis of AI operating One Model as a platform and an extension of the customer.
We now have the scale, maturity, and capability to drive the space forward in ways that weren’t possible even a few years ago. We’re pushing out platform-level innovations that expand how teams can interact with their data and soon, how the entire organization can benefit from those insights. And we’re not slowing down.
What excites me most right now is what we’re about to unlock. Historically, most People Analytics teams have had to focus on high-level macro data and problems. There was just too much work required to go deeper. But with what we’re building, we’re enabling a shift toward operational insights – team-level, workflow-level, real-world effectiveness. As Matt said recently, “Everything becomes possible once the data model is flexible enough to handle the question you haven’t asked yet.”
We’re getting to a place where People Analytics technology doesn’t just sit inside HR. It becomes an embedded part of how the business runs. And when we start layering in hybrid workforce models – where AI and humans collaborate in ways we’re only beginning to understand – that ability to adapt, question, and explore becomes even more critical. We’re ready for that.
In this video, Matthew Wilton, CTO at One Model, highlights One Model’s value across the organization, not just to HR.
It’s surreal to think we’ve been at this for ten years. And it’s even more surreal that I can honestly say I’m more excited now than I was when we started.
We’ve moved past survival. We’ve built the team, the platform, and the customer base. We’ve proven we can out-execute much larger vendors. And now, we get to focus fully on innovation, on leading, not chasing.
Major advancements we’ve made include:
And we’re proud to have been recognized for several innovative awards, including AI Breakhrough's 2025 award for “Ethical AI Solution of the Year,” and G2’s “High Performer,” “Easiest To Do Business With,” and “Users Most Likely to Recommend” awards.
Beyond awards, we’ve always said we wanted to be the company that People Analytics professionals trust to grow with them. If ten years from now we’re still doing that – still empowering teams, still adapting with the market, still building boldly – that’s a legacy worth having.
And that’s what One Model is and has always been about.
Can we show you first-hand?