Pioneera Group was recently awarded an Accelerating Commercialisation grant of $345,961 under the Australian Government’s Entrepreneurs’ Programme to help them commercialise their enterprise-grade Indie tool.
Pioneera’s Indie tool uses linguistic analysis to identify and improve workplace mental health.
Everyone remembers the time a great manager noticed their team was stressed and worked with them to reprioritise deadlines. The move to work from home meant that great managers were now missing a key component of their toolkit: the ability to get the vibe of the team and help them, quickly.
A business whose time had come
Once lockdowns and work from home became the norm, managers realised they needed support to provide modern leadership to their teams. Interest from large enterprises spiked and the team found strong pilot customers, committed to work with Pioneera to deliver the Indie tool to large groups of knowledge workers working in a hybrid environment. Their assistance in designing the project milestones helped show market pull.
Guidance, not spying
Indie is an opt-in tool, which provides nudges to help employees better manage stress during the day.
Employees who trialled it commented on its ability to help manage stress during the day without interrupting their workday, in a confidential way, while managers could see high stress times in teams, and implemented changes in work practices, which resulted in reduced stress and improved team performance. Pioneera helped improve engagement in one team to 93% during COVID-19 lockdowns.
Strong research and extensive data backing the tool
We often see early-stage companies claiming to use AI to solve problems, however the data sets they rely on are limited, resulting in poor quality recommendations. Pioneera’s algorithm has been trained over a number of years, scoring millions of words with baseline modelling and information scored by recognised experts working in linguistics, providing a very good head start.
Funding from the Australian Government’s Entrepreneurs’ Programme will assist Pioneera overcome the technical requirements imposed on software providers by large corporates. The custom reporting that will be developed will suit their target market which is over $100bn in size.
