Workday, Inc.

Is Workday publicly traded?
Yes. It trades on Nasdaq under ticker WDAY and is in the S&P 500.

Who founded Workday?
Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri in 2005, after Oracle's takeover of PeopleSoft.

Who is the CEO of Workday?
Aneel Bhusri, who returned to the role in February 2026 after Carl Eschenbach's tenure.

What does Workday sell?
Cloud software for human capital management, financial management, and planning, plus AI agents across those domains.

What companies has Workday acquired recently?
HiredScore and Evisort in 2024, and Flowise, Paradox, Sana, and Pipedream during fiscal 2026.

Is Workday part of Oracle?
No. Workday was founded specifically because Oracle acquired PeopleSoft; it remains an independent competitor to Oracle.

Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri founded Workday in 2005, days after Oracle's hostile takeover of PeopleSoft, the company Duffield had founded in 1987. They built Workday as a cloud-native alternative for HR and finance, betting that browser-based multi-tenant software would replace on-premise ERP.

The company's first HCM product shipped in 2006, and early enterprise wins validated the cloud model at a time when large employers still distrusted hosted HR data. Workday went public on the NYSE in October 2012, one of the era's landmark software IPOs, and later moved its listing to Nasdaq.

Product expansion followed a build-and-buy pattern. Workday Financial Management launched in the late 2000s, Adaptive Insights (renamed Workday Adaptive Planning) arrived in a $1.55 billion 2018 acquisition, and the company added Scout RFP, Peakon, VNDLY, and Help in subsequent years.

Bhusri served as co-CEO then sole CEO for most of the company's history. Carl Eschenbach, a Sequoia Capital partner and former VMware president, became co-CEO in 2023 and sole CEO in February 2024, driving an efficiency push that included a roughly 8.5 percent workforce reduction in early 2025. In February 2026 Bhusri returned as CEO, framing a "chapter four" strategy built on AI agents.

The AI build-out ran through acquisitions: HiredScore and Evisort in 2024, then Flowise, Paradox, Sana, and Pipedream during fiscal 2026. Sana, a Swedish AI company acquired for approximately $1.1 billion, became the foundation of the Workday Sana experience layer launched across the platform.

Workday reports on ESG through annual impact reports covering carbon neutrality commitments, workforce diversity metrics, and responsible AI principles for its agent products. Its AI approach emphasizes keeping the customer's own permissioning and audit framework inside agent workflows.

AI hiring litigation: Workday faces ongoing litigation, most prominently the Mobley v. Workday class action, alleging its screening tools discriminate against job applicants by age, race, and disability. The case, which advanced through federal court and achieved collective action status, is closely watched as a test of AI vendor liability in hiring.

Layoffs: The 2025 restructuring cut roughly 8.5 percent of the workforce, drawing the usual scrutiny that accompanies major software restructurings.