The

Sunbeam

Story

Sunbeam was born in 2023, fueled by the combined genius (and occasional chaos) of Joe Cainey and Charlie Kimber.

JOE

CHARLIE

Joe and Charlie first teamed up at Peakon — a company that pioneered learning from continuous employee feedback. Charlie, employee #2 and the OG engineer started by building presentations by hand, and ended up designing some of the most complex parts of the system. Meanwhile, Joe, armed with a PhD in Statistics and an obsession with turning messy data into actionable insights, led the data science and machine learning side. Together, they helped scale Peakon to work with thousands of companies worldwide , before it was snapped up by Workday.

After the Peakon ride, Charlie went to work on electric motorbikes in Africa, while Joe stuck around at Workday, heading up machine learning and methodology. That’s when the lightbulb moment hit 💡

Companies collect a ton of feedback but can’t make sense of it. Sure, crunching numbers is straightforward, but the real gold lies in text—the comments where people say what they actually mean. And so, Sunbeam was born.

Joe and Charlie realised that despite everything they'd leaned at Peakon, actually employee feedback was only the tip of the iceberg. The same problems existed in every department, from customer service to sales.

Today they are on a mission to help companies understand their people, customers, and products better, starting with the most important part: the why.