Simpplr Appoints Aykut Firat as Chief Data Scientist to Advance the Platform's AI and Analytical Capabilities

REDWOOD CITY, CA— January 17th, 2022— Simpplr, the leading employee experience platform for internal communications, HR, and IT professionals, is thrilled to announce the appointment of Aykut Firat as its first Chief Data Scientist. 

The addition of Aykut to Simpplr’s executive team signifies an even deeper focus on advanced analytics and artificial intelligence for the company. Before Simpplr, Aykut served as the Chief Data Scientist at Brandwatch, a leading social listening platform. At Brandwatch, Aykut developed advanced AI capabilities, including deep learning-based sentiment and emotion analysis, audience interest identification, and entity disambiguation-powered intelligent search which utilizes advanced language models such as GPT-2. These technological achievements were direct drivers to Brandwatch as the industry’s technology leader – a feat which accelerated their revenue to over $100 million in ARR and eventual acquisition by Cision. 

Before his role at Brandwatch, Aykut held numerous Chief Data titles at companies such as Crimson Hexagon, iAggregate, Affinnova, and others. He has a Ph.D. from MIT and advises other companies within the Tola Capital portfolio.

“Aykut’s role at Simpplr will allow us to dive deeper into how Simpplr customers can leverage advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, sentiment analysis, and emotion analysis to understand their employee base better and act on that information in real-time,” says Dhiraj Sharma (CEO, Simpplr): “It is rare to find a data leader with the deep knowledge Aykut has and even rarer to find one who can apply that knowledge with such passion for making employee experience professionals more effective at their jobs.”

“The value for Simpplr customers to utilize cutting edge AI to gain real-time insights on their employee base and act on that data in real-time is immense,” says Aykut Firat (CDS, Simpplr). “I am energized by the opportunity our team has to utilize advanced deep learning models for sentiment & emotion analysis and neural search, to help the entire employee experience industry gain more understanding of their teams and turn those insights into the right data-driven actions.” 

Aykut’s team will continue to advance the Simpplr platform’s advanced learning, governance, and analysis capabilities, allowing Simpplr customers to have a level of detailed insight never before seen in the employee experience space.