By Héctor C. Moncada D.
Most companies know everything about their customers and almost nothing about their own people. One founder decided that was worth fixing.
There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from seeing a problem clearly and watching everyone around you accept it as normal. For Tushneem Dharmagadda, that moment arrived in a conversation with a large employer who told him, without any particular embarrassment, that they knew everything about their customers but almost nothing about their own employees. He assumed it was specific to that company. Then he heard the same thing from another. And another. The pattern was hard to ignore and harder to unsee.
That observation became the founding idea behind HubEngage. It was not the first time Dharmagadda had built something out of a gap others had stopped noticing. Early in his career he spent years in R&D at a semiconductor firm doing work that had less to do with engineering and more to do with finding what was broken and fixing it before anyone else thought to ask. One of those fixes became a patent. The instinct that produced it never left him.
The problem HubEngage is solving is not subtle. Most enterprise HR software was built around the assumption that employees have a desk, a corporate email address, and time to log in. For the vast majority of the global workforce, none of that is true. Retail workers, hotel staff, warehouse crews, municipal employees spread across a city: they have been managed for years with tools that were designed for someone else entirely. HubEngage is a single mobile app on a personal phone, covering communications, shift scheduling, recognition, surveys, and learning. The consolidation is not a selling point. For this audience, it is the only arrangement that stands any chance of actually being used.
The platform has been developing most quickly in its learning and feedback layer, where AI now handles work that used to consume significant HR time. Surveys go out automatically, triggered by events like onboarding or shift completions, and the analysis comes back in hours rather than weeks. Microlearning quizzes are generated automatically when policies are updated. An employee chatbot answers routine questions on demand. For a smaller business without a dedicated HR team, the effect is real: the administrative weight of keeping a workforce informed and heard gets absorbed by the platform rather than falling on a manager who already has too much to do. Dharmagadda is direct about what AI is and is not in this context. “A lot of what’s being sold to CHROs right now is built on a pricing model that won’t hold,” he has said. “Human connection still has to sit at the center of the employee experience.” He is building automation for the tasks that should never have required a human in the first place, and leaving the rest alone.
That clarity extends to how he talks about building the company itself. He does not speak in the language of disruption or transformation. He talks about product-market fit, about crossing revenue milestones, about hiring people who believe in what they are working on. The entrepreneurial journey, in his telling, is less a story of vision than one of persistence. Every stage brings a different set of problems. The ones who stay long enough figure out how to treat each one as information rather than a verdict.
What Dharmagadda is building toward is specific in the way that the best entrepreneurial goals tend to be: not a market to dominate but a problem to eliminate. He wants HubEngage to be present from an employee’s first day, not the platform an organization reaches for after retention problems have already taken hold. He wants the business running 200 people across multiple locations to have the same quality of workforce tools as a corporation with a full HR department. And he wants to get there not by building something impressive but by building something that actually gets used. For a founder who started his career noticing what other people had learned to accept, that distinction is probably the whole point.
