Humanyze, a unique new firm spawned in the MIT Media Lab, has developed a system that uses a smart employee badge to collect employee behavioral data, which it links to specific metrics with the goal of improving business performance. It announced $1M in seed funding today.

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Humanyze president Ben Waber says while sports teams have done a great job of using data to evaluate their employees (players), business to this point has not used data effectively to measure the productivity of its workers. They may look at spreadsheets about overall business performance, charts about sales conversion rates and the number of leads generated by marketing, but they don’t look at how employees interact with one another and what impact that has on the bottom line. Waber and his co-founders began studying human behavior and its impact on business several years ago at the MIT Media Lab. They spun out the company, originally called Sociometric Solutions in 2010.

In order to measure human behavior, the founders needed to a tool to collect data, so they developed a smart employee badge with a microphone, accelerometer, bluetooth connection and other tools typically found in a smart phone. (In fact, it looks a bit like a cell phone.) It measures things like how people moved through the day, who they interacted with, what their tone of voice was like, if they leaned into listen and other types of interactions that happen at every company every day.

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