How CultureMonkey is helping businesses build and enhance company culture
Chennai-based CultureMonkey helps companies globally create great workplace cultures that keep employees engaged, motivated, and drive business growth.
During a talk at a tech event in February 2020, entrepreneur Senthil Kumar Muthamizhan discussed topics such as friendship, flexibility, and the importance of a welcoming atmosphere in the workplace.
Muthamizhan—who founded software development company 'effy' in 2017—soon realised that he was about building company culture. Later that year, he founded his second company, an employee engagement platform .
“With no attrition in a year and a half of effy’s existence, I realised that I was doing something right. But since it was a software company, I also wanted to create a product. After that talk, I set up CultureMonkey with my co-founders. It is an employee engagement platform, and its services act as the bridge between founders and their workforce,” Muthamizhan says.
Founded by CEO Muthamizhan, the SaaS-based company was co-founded by CTO Joseph Christopher (who also co-founded effy), and CRO Tushar Kalia—the two seasoned in enterprise engineering and GTM execution, respectively.
Designed as a SaaS platform, CultureMonkey empowers HR leaders and CXOs with real-time employee feedback, culture analytics, and engagement tools to align companies with their people-first vision. The startup is headquartered in Chennai (marketing and engineering operations), and has offices in Bengaluru (sales) and Claymont, Delaware. The company has about 60 employees.
The rare pandemic profit
As the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the world closed its doors to the ‘outside’, workforces went online. This served as a silver lining to companies that provided digital services, including CultureMonkey.
“The years 2020 and 2021 were great for us business-wise. Since everybody was working from their homes, organisations wanted to have a dashboard to check how employees were feeling. That period had increased traction for us,” Muthamizhan says.
The relationship between Indian companies and SaaS (Indian or otherwise) has been murky. According to a 2024 IDC-Zoho report, 75% of companies faced “severe deployment delays”, and that contributed to “missed revenue opportunities” amounting to Rs 5.6 crore per enterprise. Muthamizhan says modern Indian companies adopt SaaS models more often, but with a catch.
“Most new-age Indian companies adopt SaaS with more ease. But the nature of the Indian market is currently such that it demands a lot of customisation. This becomes very tricky for SaaS companies, especially bootstrapped organisations like us,” he says.
He adds that CultureMonkey’s European and US-based clients adopted its product with more ease, honouring its core philosophy. Some of CultureMonkey’s early adopters were Razorpay and ClearTax.
Key products
This business-to-business (B2B) startup prides itself on its customisable nature when it comes to enterprise problems across various sectors, like logistics, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and finance, among others. CultureMonkey enables global teams—often with over 25,000 employees speaking more than 50 languages—to engage and grow across omnichannel workflows.
“CultureMonkey is a great fit for workflows spread across the globe. We help companies facing problems with the participation rate of their employees. This is where we win,” he says.
The startup’s account management team stays constantly in touch with the customer POCs while a survey is live. “Once the survey ends, we also share reports that enable companies to see engagement hotspots and take action,” Muthamizhan explains.
The startup sees a lot of traction in the candidate engagement space. With AI agents popping up constantly, the founder says they are trying to balance the relationship between real people and AI.
“Do you know that saying ‘When you have a really good hammer, everything you look at feels like a nail’? That’s what’s happening with AI adoption right now. Instead, we are trying to optimise the repetitive processes that happen during hiring,” he says.
“The interviews will still be conducted by humans, and our AI will create a comprehensive profile for every candidate, which would make it easier for the hiring manager to make their decision,” he says, adding that this service will be live in the next few weeks.
As of 2025, CultureMonkey has over 150 clients across more than 100 countries. Pricing varies depending on the company. On average, for a 1,000-member workforce, it charges between $15,000 and $20,000 a year—an estimate that varies across different geographies and industries.
It competes with Australia-based Culture Amp and US-based companies like Qualtrics and Peakon. Unlike most competitors, CultureMonkey offers end-to-end customisable surveys that are multilingual and accessible across multiple employee touchpoints like Slack, MS Teams, email, and others.
While the founders did not disclose investment and revenue figures, the company aims for 20X growth in the next two years. It hopes to achieve this by working with enterprises across the US, Europe, and the Middle East regions.
“While we are definitely looking towards getting more funding, we adhere to the philosophy of essentialism. We want to do much more with very little, and it’s very much possible now, especially with AI,” says Muthamizhan.
(The copy was updated to reflect changes requested by the company.)
Edited by Suman Singh