As January comes to a close and we look forward to the year ahead, we’d be remiss not to reflect on 2024. It was a year of remarkable growth in many areas for Kahuna—customer wins and expansions, promotions and new hires across various departments, product updates and enhancements, and the expansion of our incredible customer community, the Kahuna Advisory Board (KAB). Let’s dive in to review some of these key skills and competency management milestones!
Table of Contents:
Growth Across Healthcare, Manufacturing, Energy, and Field Service
The demand for skills and competency-based strategies continues to grow, leading to greater adoption of skills and competency management solutions across our key industries. Advances in technology, the need for a more adaptable workforce, shifting business priorities, and ongoing talent shortages push organizations to rethink how they operate and what data is needed to operate more effectively.
Industry experts continue to emphasize the importance of skills-based strategies. David Greene highlighted key 2024 findings, noting that 90% of companies are experimenting with skills-based approaches to enhance agility, resiliency, and flexibility. McKinsey emphasizes that organizations must identify critical workforce skills and capabilities to drive productivity and achieve business goals.
As companies shift away from traditional job-based models toward more adaptable, skills and competency-driven strategies, Kahuna continues to be a trusted partner. We help organizations in oil and energy, field service, healthcare, and manufacturing use validated skills data to ensure efficient, effective, and safe operations while strategically planning for both current and future workforce needs.
Impressive Retention Rates
Our commitment to delivering meaningful, long-term value and ongoing support for each customer is reflected in our customer retention metrics. We are proud to report a 98% Gross Dollar Retention Rate and a 116% Net Dollar Retention Rate.
Beyond these metrics, our dedication to customer satisfaction earned us top recognition on G2, including badges for Best Support, Users Most Likely to Recommend, Easiest To Do Business With, and Highest User Adoption, among others, throughout 2024 and into 2025*.
*2025 badges are a result of 2024 ratings and reviews.
Significant Customer Wins
In addition to retaining existing customers, we saw a 31% increase in new logos. We’re thrilled to welcome new customers across industries and expand our footprint across diverse organizations, including leading environmental and waste management organizations, five hospitals ranked in the top 10 of the U.S. News Best Hospitals 2024-2025 national and regional rankings, renowned manufacturers of heavy equipment, industrial machinery, and food processing, as well as an organization pioneering aluminum and renewable energy.
Among these customer wins, there was a significant focus on how validated skills and competency management data can positively impact three of Kahuna’s core use cases:
Training Efficiency and Effectiveness
Helping organizations more strategically provide training, upskilling, and reskilling initiatives based on skill and organizational needs, and job role requirements to train faster and smarter.
Regulatory Compliance
Ensuring individuals, workforces, and organizations meet compliance requirements before deploying to a job to ensure safety, mitigate risk, and reduce costs associated with non-compliance.
Maximizing Workforce Potential
Optimizing efficiency and effectiveness of the workforce, ensuring the right individual is deployed to the right job based on skill proficiency and job role requirements.
Collaborating With Industry Leaders & Expanding Our Network
Establishing a partnership network and expanding Kahuna’s reach through collaborations was a focus for 2024, as these relationships not only expand our market reach but also bring true value to our customers.
- Kahuna and PXO’s partnership supports Norway’s energy sector as they navigate the energy transition, ESG initiatives, and changes to operational standards. Combining Kahuna’s skills and competency management platform with PXO’s technical and field expertise, the two organizations help companies enhance operational readiness and assurance.
- Kahuna and Amplifire have partnered to enhance workforce training by integrating Kahuna’s validated skills and competency management platform with Amplifire’s adaptive learning technology. This partnership enables organizations to deliver more targeted and effective training with a seamless, end-to-end learning and competency solution.
- Kahuna also collaborated with one of the top-rated hospital networks in the world, provides a starting point for health systems looking to digitize their competency management processes. Paired together, Kahuna’s digital skills and competency management platform and this healthcare organization’s TSAM Model enhance the clinical experience and learning opportunities for nurses throughout orientation and onboarding.
Another major highlight from our year was expanding our relationship with and receiving an investment from one of our healthcare customers, Memorial Hermann Health System. When a leading healthcare organization invests in not just the technology, but in the company itself, it signals a true commitment to the same mission and vision. We are excited to continue our partnership with Memorial Hermann and continue innovating thoughtful solutions to help our customers across industries build more resilient, future-ready workforces.
Growing Our Customer Community: The Kahuna Advisory Board (KAB)
The Kahuna Advisory Board is a group of industry experts from across our customer community who come together for collaborative sessions, community events, workshops, and fireside chats. In 2024, we were thrilled to launch our Healthcare-focused KAB, as well as expand membership for our Energy and Field Service KAB. With these incredible additions, our KAB membership has grown by ~221%!
This active collaboration has been highly impactful for members, providing a forum for industry leaders to discuss forward-thinking strategies on governance, change management, and user adoption. Our members have also been instrumental in shaping enhancements to Kahuna’s software, ensuring we continue to meet the real-world requirements of our end users.
Continuous Product Innovation
Continuously innovating and iterating our solutions to best meet the needs of our customers is a key focus for Kahuna. As one of our core values states, “Good enough sucks!” Our customers operate in complex industries that require adaptable and forward-thinking solutions to help them reach their goals, safely and efficiently. They need tools that evolve alongside the rigorous requirements of their environments and provide lasting value.
Our product and engineering teams made significant strides in 2024 enhancing our existing skills and competency management platform to support our customers, while also developing new offerings. These products, launching later this year in 2025, will provide customers with more powerful ways to leverage skills data for career development, operational efficiency, and workforce planning.
Supporting Career Development
Our career ladder product is designed to help organizations better retain and develop their workforce by providing a more streamlined, digital solution for career planning. Through conversations with our customers, we’ve seen how employees and leaders navigate professional growth programs through disconnected and manual processes. This product will give employees a clear and accessible view of career progression while enabling leadership to gain valuable insights into program participation—all while reducing administrative burdens and encouraging program engagement.
Making Sense of Skills Data
Over the years working with our industry-leading customers, we’ve realized that while many organizations recognize the importance of skills data, they often struggle to surface it or understand its direct impacts on the business. This product, focused on the value of skills data, will help customers understand, visualize, and take the guesswork out of measuring the impacts of their skills-based initiatives to make better, more informed workforce and operational decisions.
Investing In Our People
None of these successes would have been possible without the hard work, dedication, and innovation of our team. In 2024, we significantly expanded the Kahuna ‘Ohana, and we continue to be amazed and inspired by the talent joining the organization and their commitment to our company and customer success.
Key hires from this year include Vijay Kalvakuntla as CFO, Diane Mitchell as CMO, and Jeff Durand as VP of Channels and Business Development. Each of these individuals brings a wealth of knowledge in their respective fields to drive our financial strategy, expand our market reach, and strengthen partner relationships, positioning Kahuna for even greater success in the coming year.
As we continue into 2025, we want to thank our customers, partners, and Kahuna team members for making 2024 a milestone year—you all are at the heart of what we do! Here’s to an even brighter year ahead!
