In 2017, I found myself working in Communications at Starbucks, helping plan our first pay parity announcement. Even then, I was curious about how we could make this process better. Focused on finding a solution, I took my questions to the Head of Global Employment Law to ask how we actually knew whether pay was fair.
That’s when I learned about “pay equity analyses.” Backward looking. Expensive. Slow. A process companies outsourced once a year to check if they had a problem. I remember thinking there had to be a better way. What if, instead of fixing pay decisions after the fact, we could guide them in real time? Together, we jokingly called it the “Pay Fairy.”
Fast forward to 2025. We both work at Syndio now, and we’re still committed to finding that better way.
At Syndio, we’ve built the leading pay equity software used by more than 350 of the world’s most trusted companies, impacting over 10 million employees. We’ve analyzed more compensation data than anyone. And yet it’s still backward looking, episodic, and treated like a cost center.
At some point, we realized the real problem isn’t the pay analysis. It’s the pay decision.
Every day, 25 million pay decisions are made across the U.S. and Europe. Each one shapes lives, culture, and performance. Most are made with little context. It’s ironic. Pay is often a company’s largest expense yet the least informed.
Hidden inside those decisions are inefficiencies that quietly drain billions: misaligned incentives, attrition risk, wasted dollars. Pay tells the truth about a company, what it rewards, what it believes, and what it stands for.
Now a rare convergence is underway. Pay transparency has reached a tipping point. The EU Pay Transparency Directive and new U.S. laws are redefining what employees can expect. At the same time, AI has completely changed what’s possible. For the first time, we can connect, interpret, and act on contextual data with precision.
We can finally make the Pay Fairy real.
This is a moment where regulation and technology meet to turn insight into action, transforming pay from a reactive process into a proactive superpower.
Today we’re introducing Syndi, built on Syndio’s new Decision Intelligence for Pay platform. Syndi brings precision and consistency to every pay decision, at every level, helping organizations win talent, reduce attrition, control costs, and protect internal equity.
Syndi is AI native, built from the ground up. Not a layer, not an add-on. Its architecture combines probabilistic reasoning with deterministic policy logic. At its core is our Decision Graph™, a system that learns from every interaction to guide the next with greater intelligence and context.
We’re grateful to our early partners at TD SYNNEX, Toast, and others for helping us build this responsibly and effectively. Each is proving that when technology meets trust, transformation follows.
When you get pay right at every level and every decision, everything changes. Performance improves. Culture strengthens. Trust grows.
Because pay was never just about the numbers. It’s about fairness and the values that make a company worth working for.
And with Syndi, that future is here.
Meet Syndi.
