Humaans raises $5M Seed round
Giovanni Luperti
CEO at Humaans
We have joined Y Combinator, closed our Seed round, and set to radically change the way you think about HR software.
Humaans is the fastest way to onboard and manage your staff. It turns complex processes like employee onboarding, offboarding, and compensation management into simple workflows by integrating with other point solutions, such as Gsuite, Slack, Docusign, and Greenhouse.
Today we’re excited to announce that we closed a $5M Seed round led by Frontline Ventures to help us accelerate the development of our product vision and scale our operations.
I want to take a moment to give you context and to thank our customers, our team, our investors, and all those that helped along the way – your support means a lot to us.
My favourite part of this funding round (aside from the fact that we verbally closed it on Christmas Day), is the strong composition of investors that are supporting us in the journey ahead: Y Combinator, Mattias Ljungman’s Moonfire, Frontline Ventures, Lachy Groom, former Linkedin CEO Jeff Weiner with Next Play Ventures, Stripe COO Claire Johnson, Figma CEO Dylan Field, Intercom co-founder Des Traynor, former Workday CTO David Clarke, former Benchmark GP/now Adobe Scott Belsky, Notion COO Akshay Kothari, Qubit co-founder Emre Baran, Evervault CEO Shane Curren, and Stripe Security Gerardo Di Giacomo.
I’m flattered by having each one of them onboard, as well as energised that these investors,
leaders and operations see the impact that our vision can drive to the workplace as it gets fully
developed.
Market observations
Each company has unique challenges at different stages of growth. The “all-in-one” model doesn’t scale and companies are frustrated with poorly integrated and sub-optimal HR stacks.
Existing players are split across two categories: those focusing on the long tail of smaller companies, and those addressing massive corporations’ needs. Those in the middle are left underserved.
This is the opportunity we see. To build a platform that enables this massive segment of the market to scale their people operations in a way not possible today.
Building up momentum
My co-founder Karolis and I incubated Humaans in a period of exploration after we left our positions at Qubit. As people managers we had to interact with a number of HR tools and the experience was underwhelming if compared to the rest of the stack we used. From there, we collected learnings from the HR community, built the first version of our product, and onboarded early customers without raising external capital.
In April last year, we observed the world of work changing in fundamental ways and moved our focus solely on Humaans. We moved at pace to iterate on the product bringing the best mobile experience, a set of high quality integrations, and the fastest mechanics to access data.
We worked closely with a number of fast growing technology companies including Pleo, ChartMogul, Pento, Bombinate, HeySummit, that scaled their distributed workforce while using our technology. We are grateful for the trust and the opportunity to learn from their experiences and challenges – they inform our product strategy in a meaningful way.
Today we have customers with offices in 21 countries across both Europe and the US that employ people across 54 countries globally – including Korea, China, Japan, UK, Germany, Denmark, Portugal, Canada, Brazil, and more.
The right group of investors
We are privileged to have onboard some of the brightest minds in tech. Investors and operators that helped amazing companies scale and shaped new product categories.
On the European side, Frontline Ventures brings us a wealth of experience in the B2B SaaS space and Moonfire deep knowledge of the HR and Workplace technology landscape. On the US front, Y Combinator helps us with unparalleled knowledge, learnings and experience given their involvement with startups that changed the way we live (e.g. Airbnb) and Lachy Groom first hand experience with companies that changed the way we work (e.g. Notion, Superhuman, Front).
We also brought the most amazing group of operators with extensive industry knowledge and experience across product, engineering, design, go-to-market and more: Jeff Weiner (former LinkedIn CEO), Claire Johnson (Stripe COO), Dylan Field (Figma CEO), David Clarke (former Workday CTO), Scott Belsky (Behance/Adobe/former Benchmark GP), Akshay Kothari (Notion COO), Des Traynor (Intercom Co-Founder), Emre Baran (Qubit CTO), Shane Curren (Evervault CEO), and Gerardo Di Giacomo (Security at Stripe).
We could not be prouder of the trust and the support we’re getting from such amazing individuals.
Future plans
Raising capital is not a success metric. In the early days, a funding round is a vehicle to enable us to increase focus and gain the freedom to build the highest quality product without compromises.
Our goal today is to double down on product and engineering by bringing in the best talent to help fulfil our vision, increase our reach, drive value for the wider community. We’re confident that we can deliver value to a wide range of businesses no matter their setup, model or geolocation by solving their complex people challenges.
At Humaans, we're building a new kind of employee management platform designed to help teams operate collaboratively by using the best in class point solutions they need for their staff while maintaining a central record of employee data. Our vision for Humaans is to be the central hub for all employee data, enabling new tools and services to be built on top of the Humaans infrastructure.
How do we get there? By focusing relentlessly around customers’ needs and their experience, and prioritising quality, design and performance.
We want to thank our customers and early supporters that worked with us so far, our investors that believed in us and our vision, and the wider community.
Our journey is only at the beginning, and we’ll need help from exceptional human beings. If you’re as excited as we are about what’s ahead and keen to contribute, check out our career page.
I think you'd love to run your People Ops and HR function using Humaans. Schedule a demo today so that I can tell you why 😉
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