Workday, Inc.
Explore Workday
Core profile pages, annual revenue records, and related research hubs for this company.
Workday, Inc.
Explore Workday
Core profile pages, annual revenue records, and related research hubs for this company.
Company History
Founded 2005 in Pleasanton, California
Workday was founded in 2005 by Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri after Oracle acquired PeopleSoft. The company was built as a cloud-native alternative to legacy on-premise HR and finance systems.
Dave Duffield is a serial enterprise software entrepreneur who founded PeopleSoft in 1987 and Workday in 2005. Born in 1941, Duffield was 64 years old when he co-founded Workday with Aneel Bhusri, bringing decades of experience in HR and financial software development. At PeopleSoft, he pioneered client-server architecture for enterprise applications and built a company that reached $2 billion in annual revenue before Oracle's $10.3 billion hostile acquisition. Duffield's personal wealth from the PeopleSoft sale was estimated at over $1 billion, yet he chose to return to entrepreneurship rather than retire, driven by what he described as a compulsion to create and 'make the world a better place, to take the drudgery out of work.' He served as co-CEO of Workday from 2009 to 2014 alongside Aneel Bhusri, then remained as chairman until April 2022. Duffield is also the founder of Maddie's Fund, a pet rescue foundation named after his Miniature Schnauzer, into which he has poured over $300 million. He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and an MBA from Cornell University. Duffield's legacy is the architectural purity of Workday's cloud-native platform — built with no on-premise version, no legacy code, and no upgrade cycles — which remains the company's core competitive advantage.
Aneel Bhusri is the co-founder, CEO, and Executive Chair of Workday, Inc. Born in 1966, Bhusri holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and economics from Brown University and an MBA from Stanford University. He spent six years at PeopleSoft in senior leadership roles including vice chair of the board and senior vice president of product strategy, business development, and marketing, before joining Greylock Partners in 1999 as a venture capitalist. At Greylock, he invested in companies including Facebook, Dropbox, and Airbnb, gaining deep insight into platform business models and network effects. He co-founded Workday with Dave Duffield in 2005 and served as co-CEO from 2009 to 2014, then as sole CEO from 2014 to 2020. In 2020, he became co-CEO alongside Carl Eschenbach, who was expected to succeed him as sole CEO in March 2024. However, in February 2026, Eschenbach stepped down and Bhusri returned as CEO. Bhusri serves on the boards of Stanford University, Cruise, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Eat. Learn. Play., and is an advisory partner at Greylock Partners. He has also served on the boards of General Motors, Intel, Pure Storage, and Okta. Bhusri's strategic focus has been on maintaining Workday's product innovation velocity and expanding from HCM into financial management and AI-driven workforce planning.
Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri found Workday after Oracle acquires PeopleSoft.
Workday launches its early cloud HCM product, betting that large enterprises will trust HR data to a multi-tenant cloud system.
Workday goes public and becomes one of the defining enterprise cloud software IPOs of the early SaaS era.
Workday acquires Adaptive Insights, expanding into planning and analytics.
Aneel Bhusri moves to executive chair while Carl Eschenbach becomes CEO, marking a planned succession phase.
Workday announces Aneel Bhusri will return as CEO effective February 1, 2026.
Workday reports FY2026 revenue of $9.552B and subscription revenue of $8.833B.
Workday reports Q1 FY2027 revenue of $2.36B and announces the acquisition of Pipedream for AI agent workflow capabilities.
Add cloud business planning and analytics.
Add employee engagement and listening capabilities.
Add AI-driven recruiting and talent orchestration.
Add AI agent workflow and integration capabilities.
Workday traces its origins to 2005.
The founding decision to build cloud-native enterprise software after PeopleSoft was the decisive Workday turning point.
Workday grew from cloud HCM into a broader enterprise cloud suite with finance, planning, payroll, analytics, AI, and workflow tools.
This Workday profile covers founding, leadership, financials, and current strategic context.