Company: BHyve

Founded in: 2021

In her first job after MBA, 30 year-old Mumbai-based founder, Ketaki Ogale was learning more from her colleagues than from SOPs and formal training programs. She realised the company’s real strength was the wisdom and experience of its employees, one that wasn’t getting leveraged enough. That was the seed for BHyve. 

At Viacom, Ketaki learnt how global MNCs operate and worked very closely with the CTO and senior leadership on different projects, including long-term plans to support large budgets, mapping out business strategies, identifying growth opportunities and offering insights across business areas. It was an enriching experience because she got to understand how leaders think and take business decisions, and how tech can be leveraged to make business more efficient and effective.

While she was constantly on the lookout for learnings and knowledge that could help strengthen her domain expertise, she realised that large enterprises don’t have a place to document tacit knowledge – knowledge shared over water coolers, coffee chats, troubleshooting calls; knowledge which is contextual to the organisation and which cannot be found on search engines or online courses.

She discussed this problem with two childhood friends who were pursuing different careers in different parts of the world. They too recognised the same gap within their organisations and the opportunity of addressing it. The problem was right in front of them – how can organisations empower employees with the right tools to share and access experiential knowledge and data?

To dig deeper, they spoke with several organisations, including one of India’s biggest aluminium and copper manufacturing companies. The leadership was more than eager to run a pilot with Ketaki and team. That’s when they knew that they were on to something. Around the same time COVID-19 started spreading throughout the world forcing corporate employees to work from home. Having a solution for real-time knowledge-sharing thus became critical to organisations.

In early 2021, Ketaki and her co-founders launched BHyve out of Mumbai to help organisations make peer-to-peer knowledge transfer simple and hassle-free as well as make cross-functional knowledge and data easily accessible to employees. 

Today, over 80% of tacit knowledge in organisations is either undocumented or present in silos. What’s more, accessing knowledge is not just time-consuming but also tiresome and deters people from sharing success stories, experiential learnings, insights and best practices that are unique to the organisation. As a result, employees miss out on leveraging this collective intelligence and companies lose out on billions. These are visible gaps in enterprise data and knowledge collection which impact everything from sales numbers to customer satisfaction to operational efficiency, and onboarding and training talent. Current knowledge management solutions are not built for the Future of Work. They are neither intelligent nor incentivized, and the UI throws users back by 20 years.

BHyve is solving this problem by building an AI network to empower employees to connect, learn and grow while becoming more productive.

Ketaki and team’s larger mission and vision is to tokenize knowledge and make it transferable within a hexaverse which is a decentralised ecosystem of one billion knowledge passports split into three environments: corporate employees, students, and interests-driven communities.

Ketaki is building BHyve with her co-founders Omkar Pandharkame, an organisational psychologist and Vihang Mirkhelkar, a software engineer.