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The Hermis Story

We solve employee engagement for distributed workforce.  
We don’t just measure it. We enable it!

Remote work and distributed teams have become the new normal. Some companies are even getting rid of traditional workplaces all together and committing to an entirely remote workforce. Many of us in Silicon Valley have experienced varying levels of remote work first hand for quite some time now.

After decades in the tech trenches, we started Hermis based on our own experiences. We had each managed, and been a part of, globally distributed teams at some of the valley’s largest mega-techs and many smaller startups. The common thread that was missing from all of our distributed team experiences was engagement.

Engagement can be articulated differently by different people. At the end of the day, for us it means that employees & teams are connected and can draw from a social fabric that is born out of more than stock daily remote interactions. We are on a mission to enable every distributed workforce to seamlessly increase engagement, reduce isolation and actually measure how they build meaningful team relationships

Our Founding

Hermis was started by a couple of Silicon Valley veterans Mohan Gummalam and Madhu Mathihalli

Mohan Gummalam

Mohan’s journey in Silicon Valley meanders through stalwarts like Hewlett-Packard Company (when it was still one company) to various startups and pre-IPO companies like Facebook & Uber.  He was responsible for leading large organizations across various geographies and has experienced the challenge of engaging remote employees.

Madhu Mathihalli

Madhu started his career in India and worked with Mohan at Hewlett-Packard Company.  After working at Kosmix and then at Walmart Labs, he started PassageAI, which was acquired by ServiceNow.  He was managing large teams at Walmart and ServiceNow across multiple geographies, and is no stranger to challenges of engagement of teams.

Early Growth & Funding

In 2020 we partnered with Twilio to build our initial web application exclusively focused on team building.

After some early success, we were able to branch out and develop meaningful partnerships with Zoom, Webex and Microsoft which allowed us to bring the solution even closer to where remote employees “live” by providing an embedded app solution within each of their wildly popular video conference platforms. 

In 2021 we raised our first round of funding from Array Ventures, TrueBlue Partners and Zoom.

Where does Hermis name come from?

Hermis is a word play on “Hermes”, the Greek God of messenger and like many other startups, we ended up marrying a fun name with an available domain to land on Herm.is.

What are we building?

Employee engagement goes far beyond team building. We believe that engagement is a journey and it begins on the first day that a new hire joins an organization and carries through nearly every facet of that employee’s daily work life. With this core belief, we’re on the path to building comprehensive solutions that work to solve the engagement problem by not only providing the tools to increase engagement but to actually measure it.

Attempting to build a meaningful social fabric within the context of a distributed workplace requires much more than simple team building activities. We’re working with organizations that are deeply concerned with employee engagement and how that relates to employee happiness. We’re solving challenges like New Hire Onboarding, Learning & Development and Daily Meeting Productivity all with a laser focus on how employees may better engage with each other.