Chris Butler

Co-Founder & CEO One Model

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Chris Butler is the co-founder and chief executive of One Model, an enterprise people-analytics platform. The problem it addresses is mundane in description and intractable in practice: a large organisation’s workforce data is scattered across a core HR system, a recruiting system, a payroll provider, a learning platform, finance, and a dozen operational sources, each with its own definitions of things as basic as a headcount or a termination. One Model’s product ingests all of it, resolves it into a coherent model, and makes it available for analysis, prediction and reporting without the client first having to complete a multi-year data warehouse project. Butler founded the company in 2014 with David Wilson and Matthew Wilton, all three from Infohrm, a workforce-analytics firm later acquired by SuccessFactors and then SAP — which means the founding team had spent years watching enterprises fail at exactly this before building a company around it. One Model launched its platform in 2015, added machine learning with One AI in 2018, raised a $41m growth round led by Riverwood Capital in 2023, and reported reaching cash-flow positivity in the second half of 2025.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded One Model in 2014 with David Wilson and Matthew Wilton, all three Infohrm alumni, and launched the platform in 2015.
• Raised a $3.7m seed round in November 2017 backed by The Geekdom Fund, Otter Consulting, Techstars and Lontra Ventures.
• Raised a $41m growth round in August 2023 led by Riverwood Capital, to accelerate development of the company’s People Data Cloud and One AI.
• Shipped One AI in 2018, expanded visualisation capability in 2020, and launched Enterprise AI in 2026.
• Reported a record 2025, with gross annual recurring revenue retention of 95 to 100 per cent and the business turning cash-flow positive in the second half of the year.
• Nearly tripled revenue year on year in 2022.
• Established a strategic alliance with Deloitte in February 2023 and became an official Workday Innovation Partner in November 2024.
• Opened a Canadian data centre in January 2023 to give clients a local hosting option for data-sovereignty compliance.
• Built the company across offices in Austin, London and Brisbane.

Professional Journey

Butler’s career before One Model was at Infohrm, a workforce-analytics and reporting business that served large enterprises and was acquired by SuccessFactors and subsequently by SAP. He is described by his own company as an HR data and analytics expert with a long history of working with major organisations on their people-analytics programmes, and the Infohrm period is where that history was built. No source states his title there.

The founding insight of One Model came directly from that experience. Enterprises buying people-analytics tools kept encountering the same wall: the analytics layer was never the bottleneck, the data was. Every organisation had years of workforce history spread across systems that disagreed with each other, and every vendor’s answer was either a rigid pre-built model that did not fit the client’s reality, or a consulting project to build a bespoke warehouse that would be obsolete before it finished. Butler, David Wilson and Matthew Wilton founded One Model in 2014 to attack the data layer first, and launched the platform in 2015.

The company grew deliberately rather than explosively. A $3.7m seed round came in November 2017, backed by The Geekdom Fund, Otter Consulting, Techstars and Lontra Ventures. One AI arrived in 2018, adding machine learning to the platform — notably early for the HR analytics category, and several years before generative AI made the label fashionable. Tony Ashton joined from SAP SuccessFactors as chief product officer in 2019, extending the founding team’s SuccessFactors lineage. Visualisation capability was expanded in 2020, and a Canadian data centre followed in January 2023 to serve clients with data-residency requirements.

Two developments in 2023 changed the company’s position. In February it formed a strategic alliance with Deloitte, pairing its platform with Deloitte’s professional-services delivery for large transformation programmes; and in August it raised a $41m growth round led by Riverwood Capital, aimed at the People Data Cloud and One AI. In November 2024 One Model was named an official Workday Innovation Partner, a meaningful distribution and integration position given how many large employers run Workday as their core HR system, and Don Williams joined as chief revenue officer the same month.

By early 2026 the company was reporting a record year behind it: gross annual recurring revenue retention between 95 and 100 per cent, cash-flow positive in the second half of 2025, and recognition including AI Breakthrough’s 2025 Ethical AI Solution of the Year and two HR Tech Awards from Lighthouse Research & Advisory. The ethical-AI award is worth noting in context, because people analytics is a domain where model outputs bear directly on hiring, promotion and termination decisions, and where explainability is a commercial requirement rather than a preference. The company launched Enterprise AI in 2026.

Education

No educational record for Chris Butler could be found in any source reviewed, including One Model’s own materials. The absence is recorded here so that the search is not repeated from scratch.