Baraja’s journey to a stronger global culture with Marlee

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Baraja, a fast-growing deep tech company transforming LiDAR technology for autonomous vehicles, partnered with Marlee to navigate global scaling while maintaining a strong, aligned team culture. With teams expanding across Australia, China, Europe, and the US, Baraja used Marlee to understand founder leadership styles, align communication across cultures, and form high-performing teams. The result? A more cohesive, motivated workforce empowered by data-driven collaboration.

About Baraja:

Baraja is a fast-growing startup that invented Spectrum-Scan™, a revolutionary new type of LiDAR delivering best-in-class performance for self-driving vehicles.

‍Industry: LiDAR for autonomous vehicles ‍
Website: https://www.baraja.com
Employees: 100+

Challenges:

As Baraja scaled globally, from its Sydney HQ to offices across China, Europe, and the US, it faced the challenge of building a cohesive team culture across borders.

Rapid hiring through Europe and Asia, along with close collaboration with car manufacturers, meant aligning talent quickly was critical. To support its early growth, Baraja needed tools to strengthen culture, attract top talent, and build high-performing teams from the ground up.

Solution:

‍Using Marlee’s global database of human motivations, the team created a Culture Map that revealed the key attitudes shaping how Baraja works together. It gave leaders a clear view of the company’s culture in Australia, and how it compared to team motivations in the US. The results were also compared to Marlee’s success models for both startup and scale-up phases, highlighting strengths to build on and areas to evolve as the company grows.

Results:

Marlee's Culture Map provided a shared language Baraja could use to describe the team’s key attitudes and motivations toward work, making its unique culture easier to understand, communicate, and evolve.

They also opened space for reflection:

How are our current motivations helping, or holding back, our mission and vision?
What might need to shift as we enter our next stage of growth?

Baraja’s CEO and co-founders now use Marlee to openly share their own work style preferences, helping teams better understand how to collaborate. Culture insights are also used in hiring, onboarding, team collaboration workshops, and leadership offsites, ensuring Baraja’s culture continues to grow with intention.

“Marlee has been crucial for our Baraja teams. We have a debrief every time we have new team formations or additions to existing teams. It gives us direction for team compositions, hiring, and conflict resolution. There are so many “AHA” moments when we go through these debriefs.”
—Reshmi Buthello, VP of People and Culture, change management expert at Baraja

Future:

Baraja continues to use Marlee to onboard new team members, form high-performing teams, and scale its culture as the company grows. For engineers and deep tech specialists, Marlee makes it easier to articulate individual work styles, and find better ways to collaborate from day one.