Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Factorial, a startup out of Barcelona that has built a platform that lets SMBs run human resources functions with the same kind of tools that typically are used by much bigger companies, is today announcing some funding to bulk up its own position: the company has raised $80 million, funding that it will be using to expand its operations geographically — specifically deeper into Latin American markets — and to continue to augment its product with more features.

CEO Jordi Romero, who co-founded the startup with Pau Ramon and Bernat Farrero — said in an interview that Factorial has seen a huge boom of growth in the last 18 months and counts more than anything 75,000 customers across 65 countries, with the average size of each customer in the range of 100 employees, although they can be significantly (single-digit) smaller or potentially up to 1,000 (the “M” of SMB, or SME as it’s often called in Europe).

“We have a generous definition of SME,” Romero said of how the company first started with a target of 10-15 employees but is now working in the size bracket that it is. “But that is the limit. This is the segment that needs the most help. We see other competitors of ours are trying to move into SME and they are screwing up their product by making it too complex. SMEs want solutions that have as much data as possible in one single place. That is unique to the SME.” Customers can include smaller franchises of much larger organizations, too: KFC, Booking.com, and Whisbi are among those that fall into this category for Factorial.

Factorial offers a one-stop shop to manage hiring, onboarding, payroll management, time off, performance management, internal communications and more. Other services such as the actual process of payroll or sourcing candidates, it partners and integrates closely with more localized third parties.

The Series B is being led by Tiger Global, and past investors CRV, Creandum, Point Nine and K Fund also participating, at a valuation we understand from sources close to the deal to be around $530 million post-money. Factorial has raised $100 million to date, including a $16 million Series A round in early 2020, just ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic really taking hold of the world.

That timing turned out to be significant: Factorial, as you might expect of an HR startup, was shaped by Covid-19 in a pretty powerful way.

The pandemic, as we have seen, massively changed how — and where — many of us work. In the world of desk jobs, offices largely disappeared overnight, with people shifting to working at home in compliance with shelter-in-place orders to curb the spread of the virus, and then in many cases staying there even after those were lifted as companies grappled both with balancing the best (and least infectious) way forward and their own employees’ demands for safety and productivity. Front-line workers, meanwhile, faced a completely new set of challenges in doing their jobs, whether it was to minimize exposure to the coronavirus, or dealing with giant volumes of demand for their services. Across both, organizations were facing economics-based contractions, furloughs, and in other cases, hiring pushes, despite being office-less to carry all that out.

All of this had an impact on HR. People who needed to manage others, and those working for organizations, suddenly needed — and were willing to pay for — new kinds of tools to carry out their roles.

But it wasn’t always like this. In the early days, Romero said the company had to quickly adjust to what the market was doing.

“We target HR leaders and they are currently very distracted with furloughs and layoffs right now, so we turned around and focused on how we could provide the best value to them,” Romero said to me during the Series A back in early 2020. Then, Factorial made its product free to use and found new interest from businesses that had never used cloud-based services before but needed to get something quickly up and running to use while working from home (and that cloud migration turned out to be a much bigger trend played out across a number of sectors). Those turning to Factorial had previously kept all their records in local files or at best a “Dropbox folder, but nothing else,” Romero said.

It also provided tools specifically to address the most pressing needs HR people had at the time, such as guidance on how to implement furloughs and layoffs, best practices for communication policies and more. “We had to get creative,” Romero said.

But it wasn’t all simple. “We did suffer at the beginning,” Romero now says. “People were doing furloughs and [frankly] less attention was being paid to software purchasing. People were just surviving. Then gradually, people realized they needed to improve their systems in the cloud, to manage remote people better, and so on.” So after a couple of very slow months, things started to take off, he said.

Factorial’s rise is part of a much, longer-term bigger trend in which the enterprise technology world has at long last started to turn its attention to how to take the tools that originally were built for larger organizations, and right size them for smaller customers.

The metrics are completely different: large enterprises are harder to win as customers, but represent a giant payoff when they do sign up; smaller enterprises represent genuine scale since there are so many of them globally — 400 million, accounting for 95% of all firms worldwide. But so are the product demands, as Romero pointed out previously: SMBs also want powerful tools, but they need to work in a more efficient, and out-of-the-box way.

Factorial is not the only HR startup that has been honing in on this, of course. Among the wider field are PeopleHR, Workday, Infor, ADP, Zenefits, Gusto, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Rippling; and a very close competitor out of Europe, Germany’s Personio, raised $125 million on a $1.7 billion valuation earlier this year, speaking not just to the opportunity but the success it is seeing in it.

But the major fragmentation in the market, the fact that there are so many potential customers, and Factorial’s own rapid traction are three reasons why investors approached the startup, which was not proactively seeking funding when it decided to go ahead with this Series B.

“The HR software market opportunity is very large in Europe, and Factorial is incredibly well positioned to capitalize on it,” said John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global, in a statement. “Our diligence found a product that delighted customers and a world-class team well-positioned to achieve Factorial’s potential.”

“It is now clear that labor markets around the world have shifted over the past 18 months,” added Reid Christian, general partner at CRV, which led its previous round, which had been CRV’s first investment in Spain. “This has strained employers who need to manage their HR processes and properly serve their employees. Factorial was always architected to support employers across geographies with their HR and payroll needs, and this has only accelerated the demand for their platform. We are excited to continue to support the company through this funding round and the next phase of growth for the business.”

Notably, Romero told me that the fundraising process really evolved between the two rounds, with the first needing him flying around the world to meet people, and the second happening over video links, while he was recovering himself from Covid-19. Given that it was not too long ago that the most ambitious startups in Europe were encouraged to relocate to the U.S. if they wanted to succeed, it seems that it’s not just the world of HR that is rapidly shifting in line with new global conditions.

If you haven’t noticed yet, the hiring market is a hot one — and getting more complicated as enterprise talent acquisition leaders face technology gaps while assessing candidates. This leads to difficulty in determining compensation.

Enter Compa. The offer management platform provides “deal desk” software for recruiters to more easily manage their compensation strategies to create and communicate offers that are easy to understand and are unbiased.

Charlie Franklin, co-founder and CEO of Compa, told TechCrunch it was frustrating to lose a candidate at the compensation stage, so the company created its software to reduce the challenge of relying on crowdsourcing data or surveys to compare pay.

“Recruiters often lack the data and tools to figure out how much to pay people and communicate that effectively,” Franklin told TechCrunch. “We see talent acquisitions teams like a sales team. If you think of it from that perspective, they need to close a candidate, but to ask the recruiter to operate off of a spreadsheet slows that process down.”

Compa co-founders, from left, Charlie Franklin, Joe Malandruccolo and Taylor Cone. Image Credits: Compa

With Compa, recruiters can input pay expectations and compare recent offers and collaborate with other team members and hiring managers to reach pay consensus quicker. The software automates all of the market intelligence in real time and provides insights about compensation across similar industries and organizations.

The company, based in both California and Massachusetts, emerged from stealth Thursday with $3.9 million in seed funding led by Base10 Partners. Participation in the round also came from Crosscut Ventures and Acadian Ventures, as well as a group of strategic angel investors including 2.12 Angels, Oyster HR CEO Tony Jamous and Scout RFP co-founders Stan Garber and Alex Yakubovich.

Jamison Hill, partner at Base10 Partners, said via email his firm was doing research in the ESG “megatrend,” particularly looking for startups focused on compensation management, when it came across Compa.

He was attracted to the founders’ “clarity and conviction” on the company’s vision, their understanding of the pay gap in the market, how Compa’s solution would “create a new wave of smarter, more-data driven recruiting teams” and how it was enabling employers to use compensation and a positive offer management approach to differentiate itself from competitors.

“They deeply understand the nuances that come with enterprise-level HR teams and bring that expertise to every aspect of Compa’s product offering, which is why we believe Compa can emerge as a leader in this trend and chose to partner with this very special team,” Hill added.

Franklin, who previously led human resources M&A at Workday, founded Compa last year with  Joe Malandruccolo, who was on the engineering side at Facebook and Oculus, and Taylor Cone, who has done innovation consulting for organizations like Stanford University.

The company was bootstrapped prior to going after the seed round and will use the capital to expand the team and create additional products that fit into its mission of “making compensation fair and competitive for everyone,” Franklin said.

Going forward, he adds that job offers and compensation need to catch up to how quickly the world is changing. As more people work remotely and companies want to attract a diverse workforce, compensation will be an important factor.

“This is a long-term trend we are seeing in HR — compensation becoming more transparent — not just a spreadsheet shared internally, but a transition from secretive to open and accountable, Franklin said. “Technology is catching up to that, and we have the ability to produce outcomes that drive differences in pay.”

For many of us, going to work these days no longer means going into a specific office like it used to; and today one of the startups that’s built a platform to help cater to that new, bigger world of employment — wherever talent might be — is announcing a major round of funding on the back of strong demand for its tools.

Remote, which provides tools to manage onboarding, payroll, benefits and other services for tech and other knowledge workers located in remote countries — be they contractors or full-time employees — has raised $150 million. Job van der Voort, the Dutch-based CEO and co-founder of New York-based Remote, confirmed in an interview that funding values Remote at over $1 billion.

Accel is leading this Series B, with participation also from previous investors Sequoia, Index Ventures, Two Sigma, General Catalyst and Day One Ventures.

The funding will be used in a couple of areas. First and foremost, it will go toward expanding its business to more markets. The startup has been built from the ground up in a fully integrated way, and in contrast to a number of others that it competes with in providing Employer of Record services, Remote fully owns all of its infrastructure. It now provides its HR services, as fully operational legal entities, for 50 countries (it has a target of growing that to 80 by the end of this year). The platform is also set to be enhanced with more tools around areas like benefits, equity incentive planning, visa and immigration support and employee relocation.

“We are doubling down on our approach,” van der Voort said. “We try to fully own the entire stack: entity, operations, experts in house, payroll, benefits and visa and immigration — all of the items that come up most often. We want to to build infrastructure products, foundational products because those have a higher level of quality and ultimately a lower price.”

In addition, Remote will be using the funding to continue building more tools and partnerships to integrate with other providers of services in what is a very fragmented human resources market. Two of these are being announced today to coincide with the funding news: Remote has launched a Global Employee API that HR platforms that focus on domestic payroll can integrate to provide their own international offering powered by Remote. HR platform Rippling (Parker Conrad’s latest act) is one of its first customers. And Remote is also getting cosier with other parts of the HR chain of services: applicant tracking system Greenhouse is now integrating with it to help with the onboarding process for new hires.

Indeed, $150 million at a $1 billion+ valuation is a very, very sizable Series B, even by today’s flush-market standards, but it comes after a bumper year for the company, and in particular since November last year when it raised a Series A of $35 million. In the last nine months, customer numbers have grown seven-fold, with users on the platform increasing 10 times. Most interestingly, perhaps, is that Remote’s revenues — its packages start at $149 per month but go up from there — have increased by a much bigger amount: 65x, the company said. That basically points to the fact that engagement from those users — how much they are leaning on Remote’s tech — has skyrocketed.

Although there are a lot of competitors in the same space as Remote — they include a number of more local players alongside a pretty big range of startups like Oyster (which announced $50 million in funding in June), Deel, which is now valued at $1.25 billion; Turing; Papaya Global (now also valued at over $1 billion); and many more — the opportunity they are collectively tackling is a massive one that, if anything, appears to be growing.

Hiring internationally has always been a costly, time-consuming and organizationally challenged endeavor, so much so that many companies have opted not to do it at all, or to reserve it for very unique cases. That paradigm has drastically shifted in recent years, however.

Even before COVID-19 hit, there was a shortage of talent, resulting in a competitive struggle for good people, in companies’ home markets, which encouraged companies to look further afield when hiring. Then, once looking further afield, those employers had to give consideration to employing those people remotely — that is, letting them work from afar — because the process of relocating them had also become more expensive and harder to work through.

Then COVID-19 happened, and everyone, including people working in a company’s HQ, started to work remotely, changing the goalposts yet again on what is expected by workers, and what organizations are willing to consider when bringing on a new person, or managing someone it already knows, just from a much farther distance.

While a lot of that has played out in the idea of relocating to different cities in the same country — Miami and Austin getting a big wave of Silicon Valley “expats” being two examples of that — it seems just a short leap to consider that now that sourcing and managing is taking on a much more international slant. A lot of new hires, as well as existing employees who are possibly not from the U.S. to begin with, or simply want to see another part of the world, are now also a part of the mix. That is where companies like Remote are coming in and lowering the barriers to entry by making it as easy to hire and manage a person abroad as it is in your own city.

“Remote is at the center of a profound shift in the way that companies hire,” said Miles Clements, a partner at Accel, in a statement. “Their new Global Employee API opens up access to Remote’s robust global employment infrastructure and knowledge map, and will help any HR provider expand internationally at a speed impossible before. Remote’s future vision as a financial services provider will consolidate complicated processes into one trusted platform, and we’re excited to partner with the global leader in the quickly emerging category of remote work.”

And it’s interesting to see it now partnering with the likes of Rippling. It was a no-brainer that as the latter company matured and grew, it would have to consider how to handle the international component. Using an API from Remote is an example of how the model that has played out in communications (led by companies like Twilio and Sinch) and fintech (hello, Stripe) also has an analogue in HR, with Remote taking the charge on that.

And to be clear, for now Remote has no plans to build a product that it would sell directly to individuals.

“Individuals are reaching out to us, saying, ‘I found this job and can you help me and make sure I get paid?’ That’s been interesting,” van der Voort said. “We thought about [building a product for them] but we have so much to do with employers first.” One thing that’s heartening in Remote’s approach is that it wouldn’t want to provide this service unless it could completely follow through on it, which in the case of an individual would mean “vetting every major employer,” he said, which is too big a task for it right now.

In the meantime, Remote itself has walked the walk when it comes to remote working. Originally co-founded by two European transplants to San Francisco, the pair had firsthand experience of the paradoxical pains and opportunities of being in an organization that uses remote workforces.

Van der Voort had been the VP of product for GitLab, which he scaled from five to 450 employees working remotely (it’s now a customer of Remote’s); and before co-founding Remote, CTO Marcelo Lebre had been VP of engineering for Unbabel — another startup focused on reducing international barriers, this time between how companies and global customers communicate.

Today, not only is the CEO based out of Amsterdam in The Netherlands, with the CTO in Lisbon, Portugal, but New York-based Remote itself has grown to 220 from 50 employees, and this wider group has also been working remotely across 47 countries since November 2020.

“The world is looking very different today,” van der Voort said. “The biggest change for us has been the size of the organization. We’ve gone from 50 to more than 200 employees, and I haven’t met any of them! We have tried to follow our values of bringing opportunity everywhere so we hire everywhere as we solve that for our customers, too.”

Diversity and inclusion have become central topics in the world of work. In the best considerations, improving them is a holistic effort, involving not just conceiving of products with this in mind, but hiring and managing talent in a diverse and inclusive way, too. A new startup called Pequity that has built a product to help with the latter of these areas, specifically in equitable compensation, has now raised some funding — a sign of the demand in the market, as well as how tech is being harnessed in aid of helping it.

The San Francisco-based startup has raised $19 million in a Series A led by Norwest Venture Partners. First Round Capital, Designer Fund, and Scribble Ventures also participated in the fundraise, which will be used to continue investing in product and also hiring: the company has 20 on its own books now and will aim to double that by the end of this year, on the heels of positive reception in the market.

Since launching officially last year, Pequity has picked up over 100 customers, with an initial focus on fast-scaling companies in its own backyard, a mark of how D&I have come into focus in the tech industry in particular. Those using Pequity to compare and figure out compensation include Instacart, Scale.ai and ClearCo, and the company said that in the last four months, the platform’s been used to make more then 5,000 job offers.

Image Credits: Pequity (opens in a new window)

Kaitlyn Knopp, the CEO who co-founded the company with Warren Lebovics (both pictured, right), came up for the idea for Pequity in much the same way that many innovations in the world of enterprise IT come to market: through her own first-hand experience.

She spent a decade working in employment compensation in the Bay Area, with previous roles at Google, Instacart, and Cruise. In that time, she found the tools that many companies used were lacking and simply “clunky” when it came to compensation analysis.

“The way the market has worked so far is that platforms had compensation as an element but not the focus,” she said. “It was the end of the tagline, the final part of a ‘CRM for candidates.’ But you still have to fill in all the gaps, you have to set the architecture the right way. And with compensation, you have to bake in your own analytics, which implies that you have to have some expertise.”

Indeed, as with other aspects of enterprise software, she added that the very biggest tech companies sometimes worked on their own tools, but not only does that leave smaller or otherwise other-focused businesses out of having better calculation tools, but it also means that those tools are siloed and miss out on being shaped by a bigger picture of the world of work. “We wanted to take that process and own it.”

The Pequity product essentially works by plugging into all of the other tools that an HR professional might be using — HRIS, ATS, and payroll products — to manage salaries across the whole of the organization in order to analyse and compare how compensation could look for existing and prospective employees. It combines a company’s own data and then compares it to data from the wider market, including typical industry ranges and market trends, to provide insights to HR teams.

All of this means that HR teams are able to make more informed decisions, which is step number one in being more transparent and equitable, but is also something that Pequity is optimized to cover specifically in how it measures compensation across a team.

And in line with that, there is another aspect of the compensation mindset that Knopp also wanted to address in a standalone product, and that is the idea of building a tool with a mission, one of providing a platform that can bring in data to make transparent and equitable decisions.

“A lot of the comp tools that I’ve interacted with are reactive,” she said. “You may have to do, say, a pay equity test, you do your promotion and merit cycles, and then you find all these issues that you have to solve. We’re flagging those things proactively with our analytics, because we’re plugging into those systems, which will give you those alerts before the decisions need to be made.”

As an added step in that direction, Knopp said that ultimately she believes the tool should be something that those outside of HR, such as managers and emploiyees themselves, should be able to access to better understand the logic of their own compensation and have more information going into any kind of negotiation.

Ultimately, it will be interesting to see whether modernized products like Pequity, which are tackling old problems with a new approach and point of view, find traction in the wider market. If one purpose in HR is to address diversity and inclusion, and part of the problem has been that the tools are just not fit for that purpose, then it seems a no-brainer that we’ll see more organizations trying out new things to see if they can help them in their own race to secure talent.

“Compensation reflects a company’s values, affects its ability to hire talent, and is the biggest expense on its P&L. And yet, most comp teams run on spreadsheets and emails,” said Parker Barrile, Partner at Norwest, in a statement. “Pequity empowers comp teams to design and manage equitable compensation programs with modern software designed by comp professionals, for comp professionals.”

Diversity and inclusion have become central topics in the world of work. In the best considerations, improving them is a holistic effort, involving not just conceiving of products with this in mind, but hiring and managing talent in a diverse and inclusive way, too. A new startup called Pequity that has built a product to help with the latter of these areas, specifically in equitable compensation, has now raised some funding — a sign of the demand in the market, as well as how tech is being harnessed in aid of helping it.

The San Francisco-based startup has raised $19 million in a Series A led by Norwest Venture Partners. First Round Capital, Designer Fund, and Scribble Ventures also participated in the fundraise, which will be used to continue investing in product and also hiring: the company has 20 on its own books now and will aim to double that by the end of this year, on the heels of positive reception in the market.

Since launching officially last year, Pequity has picked up over 100 customers, with an initial focus on fast-scaling companies in its own backyard, a mark of how D&I have come into focus in the tech industry in particular. Those using Pequity to compare and figure out compensation include Instacart, Scale.ai and ClearCo, and the company said that in the last four months, the platform’s been used to make more then 5,000 job offers.

Image Credits: Pequity (opens in a new window)

Kaitlyn Knopp, the CEO who co-founded the company with Warren Lebovics (both pictured, right), came up for the idea for Pequity in much the same way that many innovations in the world of enterprise IT come to market: through her own first-hand experience.

She spent a decade working in employment compensation in the Bay Area, with previous roles at Google, Instacart, and Cruise. In that time, she found the tools that many companies used were lacking and simply “clunky” when it came to compensation analysis.

“The way the market has worked so far is that platforms had compensation as an element but not the focus,” she said. “It was the end of the tagline, the final part of a ‘CRM for candidates.’ But you still have to fill in all the gaps, you have to set the architecture the right way. And with compensation, you have to bake in your own analytics, which implies that you have to have some expertise.”

Indeed, as with other aspects of enterprise software, she added that the very biggest tech companies sometimes worked on their own tools, but not only does that leave smaller or otherwise other-focused businesses out of having better calculation tools, but it also means that those tools are siloed and miss out on being shaped by a bigger picture of the world of work. “We wanted to take that process and own it.”

The Pequity product essentially works by plugging into all of the other tools that an HR professional might be using — HRIS, ATS, and payroll products — to manage salaries across the whole of the organization in order to analyse and compare how compensation could look for existing and prospective employees. It combines a company’s own data and then compares it to data from the wider market, including typical industry ranges and market trends, to provide insights to HR teams.

All of this means that HR teams are able to make more informed decisions, which is step number one in being more transparent and equitable, but is also something that Pequity is optimized to cover specifically in how it measures compensation across a team.

And in line with that, there is another aspect of the compensation mindset that Knopp also wanted to address in a standalone product, and that is the idea of building a tool with a mission, one of providing a platform that can bring in data to make transparent and equitable decisions.

“A lot of the comp tools that I’ve interacted with are reactive,” she said. “You may have to do, say, a pay equity test, you do your promotion and merit cycles, and then you find all these issues that you have to solve. We’re flagging those things proactively with our analytics, because we’re plugging into those systems, which will give you those alerts before the decisions need to be made.”

As an added step in that direction, Knopp said that ultimately she believes the tool should be something that those outside of HR, such as managers and emploiyees themselves, should be able to access to better understand the logic of their own compensation and have more information going into any kind of negotiation.

Ultimately, it will be interesting to see whether modernized products like Pequity, which are tackling old problems with a new approach and point of view, find traction in the wider market. If one purpose in HR is to address diversity and inclusion, and part of the problem has been that the tools are just not fit for that purpose, then it seems a no-brainer that we’ll see more organizations trying out new things to see if they can help them in their own race to secure talent.

“Compensation reflects a company’s values, affects its ability to hire talent, and is the biggest expense on its P&L. And yet, most comp teams run on spreadsheets and emails,” said Parker Barrile, Partner at Norwest, in a statement. “Pequity empowers comp teams to design and manage equitable compensation programs with modern software designed by comp professionals, for comp professionals.”

Human resources is generally a salient cornerstone of any organization, but digitization has democratized a lot of the work that goes into HR, and that’s meant more people in businesses interested in, and using, the kind of data that HR people build and typically manage. Today, a startup called ChartHop that’s built a platform to cater to that trend is announcing $35 million in funding on the heels of strong growth.

The Series B is being led by Andreessen Horowitz, a past backer, with Elad Gil and previous investors Cowboy Ventures and SemperVirens also participating. We understand from sources close to the company that the round values ChartHop at between $300 million and $400 million.

ChartHop was founded in New York by Ian White, now the CEO, who first started building the tools to fill what he felt were gaps in his own knowledge when he founded, ran and eventually sold his previous company, Sailthru (which was acquired by CampaignMonitor).

He said he realized the company could build “all the tech we wanted,” but when it came down to thinking about how to run and scale the business, that was at its heart actually a people question, and also understanding how departments, and the entire organization, looked and worked as a whole.

Image Credits: ChartHop

“It was not as important as hiring, structuring a ‘single you’ of the organization,” he said. (Ian’s pictured here to the right.) Similar to the great analytics tools that have been built for developers, sales teams and others, “What I wanted was people analytics,” he said. “I wanted to understand my team.”

That’s actually a very multifaceted question. It’s not just a matter of an org chart — a big enough task in its own right that the very day that ChartHop came out of stealth in early 2020, another org chart startup, The Org, launched, too. It’s also retention strategy, employee satisfaction, turnover statistics, diversity statistics, predictive visualizations on finances if one area was compensated differently, or if hiring were frozen, etc. “All of those problems became mine and there was no great software out there to solve for it,” White said.

The ChartHop platform is built like all strong structures these days in the world of tech: tons of integrations to feed data into ChartHop to make it richer; tons of integrations also to export and use that data in more dedicated applications when needed; and an easy way for everyone to update data but also put in place easy and strong protections to keep confidential data as it should be.

And while HR still “owns” the platform, White said, it can be accessed and used by anyone in the organization, and it is.

It seems that others have found the talent management software market lacking for it, too. Since 2019 it went from a team of one — White himself — to 75, with 130 corporates now using its services. The list has a strong list of household company names with a heavy emphasis in tech, from what White showed me. Revenues in the last 12 months — a time when the spread-out nature of many of our workplaces has meant an even greater need for a platform to manage all the information has possibly reached a high water mark — have grown at a rate of 17% month-by-month.

“With HR and people functions so crucial to the growth and success of businesses, it’s unfortunate that most HR teams lack the critical people data to drive organizational decision making,” said David Ulevitch, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, in a statement. “ChartHop is the solution to this all-too-common problem, and is built by company leaders who have felt this pain personally. ChartHop’s visual approach to people analytics allows leaders to make organizational planning and strategy decisions with confidence. We’re thrilled to lead ChartHop’s Series B because of their impressive growth, the company’s vision, and the terrific, mission-oriented team they’ve assembled.” He also led the company’s seed round in February 2020.

“Since implementing ChartHop earlier this year, we’ve seen significant improvement in our engagement with talent routines as they’re managed via ChartHop,” said Sara Howe, vice president human resources at ZoomInfo, a customer of ChartHop, in a statement. “Our employees have found the simple user interface and the centralized view of their data as the most helpful features. Leaders across ZoomInfo have also leveraged ChartHop to ensure that their organizations are well structured to support our continued rapid growth.”

With the last year changing how (and where) many of us work, organizations have started to rethink how well they manage their employees, and what tools they use to do that. Today, one of the startups that is building technology to address this challenge is announcing a major round of funding that underscores its traction to date.

Personio — the German startup that targets small- and medium-sized businesses (10-2,000 employees) with an all-in-one HR platform covering recruiting and onboarding, payroll, absence tracking and other major HR functions — has picked up $125 million in funding at a $1.7 billion post-money valuation.

The Series D is being co-led by Index Ventures and Meritech, with previous backers Accel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northzone, Global Founders Capital and Picus all participating.

The $1.7 billion valuation is a big jump on the company’s $500 million valuation a year ago, and it comes after a year where the startup has doubled its revenues and was not on the hunt to raise, with much of its previous fundraising still in the bank.

Personio currently counts some 3,000 SMEs in Europe as customers.

In an interview, Hanno Renner, the co-founder and CEO of Personio, said that the startup would be using the funding to continue building out the product — which operates a little like Workday, but built for much smaller organizations — as well as expanding its presence in Europe.

Although SMEs can be a notoriously challenging customer segment, Renner said that a new opportunity has emerged: A new wave of people in the SME sector have started to realise the value of having a modern and integrated HR platform.

“We started Personio in 2016 wanting to become the leading HR platform for midmarket companies, and we knew it could be a great company, but we realize it can be hard to grasp what HR really means,” he said. “But I think what has driven our business in the past year has been the realization that HR is not just an important part, but maybe the most important part, of any business.”

It may take one magic turn to convert users, he said, by providing (as one example) tools to recruit, sign contracts and onboard new employees remotely. Still, he acknowledges that the midmarket — especially those companies not built around technology — has been “lagging for years,” with many still working off Excel spreadsheets, or even more surprisingly, pen and paper. “Supporting them by helping them to digitize in a more efficient way has been driving our business.”

Personio is not the only startup hopeful that the shift in how we work will bring a new appreciation (and appetite) for purchasing HR tools. Others like Hibob have also seen a big boost in their business and have also been raising money to tap into the opportunity more aggressively.

Hibob is looking to build in more training tools, underscoring the feature race that Personio will also have to run to keep up.

But given the sheer numbers of SMBs in the European market — more than 25 million, and accounting for more than 99% of all enterprises, according to research from the European Union — the fact that many of them have yet to adopt any kind of HR platform at all, there remains a lot of growth for a number of players.

“SMEs are the backbone of the European economy, employing 100 million people across the continent, but it is also a sector that has been neglected by software companies focused predominantly on large enterprises,” Martin Mignot, a partner at Index who sits on Personio’s board, said in a statement. “Personio changes that, having created a set of powerful tools tailored to address the needs of small businesses.”

“We have had the pleasure of working with some of the most successful SaaS companies in the world, and given Personio’s success over the past five years and the immense market potential, we strongly believe in Personio’s ability to build an equally successful and impactful business,” added Alex Clayton, general partner at Meritech Capital, in his own statement. “After many great discussions with Hanno over recent years, we are now excited to be joining the journey.” Clayton is also joining the board with this round.

A startup that’s hoping to be a contender in the very large and fragmented market of human resources software has captured the eye of a big investor out of the US and become its first investment in Spain.

Barcelona-based Factorial, which is building an all-in-one HR automation platform aimed at small and medium businesses that manages payroll, employee onboarding, time off and other human resource functions, has raised €15 ($16 million) in a Series A round of funding led by CRV, with participation also from existing investors Creandum, Point Nine and K Fund.

The money comes on the heels of Factorial — which has customers in 40 countries — seeing eightfold growth in revenues in 2019, with more than 60,000 customers now using its tools.

Jordi Romero, the CEO who co-founded the company with Pau Ramon (CTO) and Bernat Farrero (head of corporate), said in an interview that the investment will be used both to expand to new markets and add more customers, as well as to double down on tech development to bring on more features. These will include RPA integrations to further automate services, and to move into more back-office product areas such as handling expenses,

Factorial has now raised $18 million and is not disclosing its valuation, he added.

The funding is notable on a couple of levels that speak not just to the wider investing climate but also to the specific area of human resources.

In addition to being CRV’s first deal in Spain, the investment is being made at a time when the whole VC model is under a lot of pressure because of the global coronavirus pandemic — not least in Spain, which has a decent, fledgling technology scene but has been one of the hardest-hit countries in the world when it comes to COVID-19.

“It made the closing of the funding very, very stressful,” Romero said from Barcelona last week (via video conference). “We had a gentleman’s agreement [so to speak] before the virus broke out, but the money was still to be wired. Seeing the world collapse around you, with some accounts closing, and with the bigger business world in a very fragile state, was very nerve wracking.”

Ironically, it’s that fragile state that proved to be a saviour of sorts for Factorial.

“We target HR leaders and they are currently very distracted with furloughs and layoffs right now, so we turned around and focused on how we could provide the best value to them,” Romero said.

The company made its product free to use until lockdowns are eased up, and Factorial has found a new interest from businesses that had never used cloud-based services before but needed to get something quickly up and running to use while working from home. He noted that among new companies signing up to Factorial, most either previously kept all their records in local files or at best a “Dropbox folder, but nothing else.”

The company also put in place more materials and other tools specifically to address the most pressing needs those HR people might have right now, such as guidance on how to implement furloughs and layoffs, best practices for communication policies and more. “We had to get creative,” Romero said.

At $16 million, this is at the larger end of Series A rounds as of January 2020, and while it’s definitely not as big as some of the outsized deals we’ve seen out of the US, it happens to be the biggest funding round so far this year in Spain.

Its rise feels unlikely for another reason, too: it comes at a time when we already have dozens (maybe even hundreds) of human resources software businesses, with many an established name — they include PeopleHR, Workday, Infor, ADP, Zenefits, Gusto, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Rippling, and many others — in a market that analysts project will be worth $38.17 billion by 2027 growing at a CAGR of over 11%.

But as is often the case in tech, status quo breeds disruption, and that’s the case here. Factorial’s approach has been to build HR tools specifically for people who are not HR professionals per se: companies that are small enough not to have specialists, or if they do, they share a lot of the tasks and work with other managers who are not in HR first and foremost.

It’s a formula that Romero said could potentially see the company taking on bigger customers, but for now, investors like it for having built a platform approach for the huge but often under-served SME market.

“Factorial was built for the users, designed for the modern web and workplace,” said Reid Christian, General Partner at CRV, in a statement. “Historically the HR software market has been one of the most lucrative categories for enterprise tech companies, and today, the HR stack looks much different. As we enter the third generation of cloud HR products, with countless point solutions, there’s a strong need for an underlying platform to integrate work across these.”

Remember when Zenefits imploded, and kicked out CEO Parker Conrad. Well, Conrad launched a new employee onboarding startup called Rippling, and now he’s going after another HR company called Gusto with a new billboard, “Outgrowing Gusto? Presto change-o.”

The problem is, Gusto got it taken down by issuing a cease & desist order to Rippling and the billboard operator Clear Channel Outdoor. That’s despite the law typically allowing comparative advertising as long as it’s accurate. Gusto sells HR, benefits and payroll software, while Rippling does the same but adds in IT management to tie together an employee identity platform.

Rippling tells me that outgrowing Gusto is the top reasons customers say they’re switching to Rippling. Gusto’s customer stories page lists no customers larger than 61 customers, and Enlyft research says the company is most often used by 10 to 50-person staffs. “We were one of Gusto’s largest customers when we left the platform last year. They were very open about the fact that the product didn’t work for businesses of our size. We moved to Rippling last fall and have been extremely happy with it,” says Compass Coffee co-founder Michael Haft.

That all suggests the Rippling ad’s claim is reasonable. But the C&D claims that “Gusto counts as customers multiple companies with 100 or more employees and does not state the businesses will ‘outgrow’ their platfrom at a certain size.”

In an email to staff provided to TechCrunch, Rippling CMO Matt Epstein wrote, “We take legal claims seriously, but this one doesn’t pass the laugh test. As Gusto says all over their website, they focus on small businesses.”

So rather than taking Gusto to court or trying to change Clear Channel’s mind, Conrad and Rippling did something cheeky. They responded to the cease & desist order in Shakespeare-style iambic pentameter.

Our billboard struck a nerve, it seems. And so you phoned your legal teams,
who started shouting, “Cease!” “Desist!” and other threats too long to list.

Your brand is known for being chill. So this just seems like overkill.
But since you think we’ve been unfair, we’d really like to clear the air.

Rippling’s general counsel Vanessa Wu wrote the letter, which goes on to claim that “When Gusto tried to scale itself, we saw what you took off the shelf. Your software fell a little short. You needed Workday for support,” asserting that Gusto’s own HR tool couldn’t handle its 1,000-plus employees and needed to turn to a bigger enterprise vendor. The letter concludes with the implication that Gusto should drop the cease-and-desist, and instead compete on merit:

So Gusto, do not fear our sign. Our mission and our goals align.
Let’s keep this conflict dignified—and let the customers decide.

I’ve been following Estonia-headquartered Jobbatical and its founder, Karoli Hindriks, for years. Part of the vanguard of startups working on infrastructure for digital nomads, the startup has been building the base platform to help global job seekers hire and fire their governments.

As Jobbatical has worked with more and more companies and governments though, it has learned that the friction here is not just finding employment globally for talented individuals, but rather the actual process of applying for immigration and work permits, ranging from forms that must be filed in person to the hours of labor it can take to fill out an application.

“What started to happen was that the relocation part… became something that the clients came back to us and said, ‘Can you do relocation for everyone and not just those coming through Jobbatical?’” Hindriks explained.

Last year, Jobbatical began to refocus its platform on powering relocation for workers at companies, and now its new strategy is coming into focus with the launch of the company’s new offices in Spain and Germany, announced on stage earlier today at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

In the process, the company hopes to not just make the immigration process easier — but also much faster.

“How much time are government officials doing dummy work?” Hindriks asked. “30-40% of the consulate’s time is spent on answering the question of ‘what is the status of my visa?’”

The problem is that feedback in the immigration system is not available to all the players involved. Immigration process agents at companies who handle their workers’ visas have to constantly search around to make sure they are moving each of their cases forward. Managers have no idea when their workers may move, while employees are kept in the dark about their current status, inducing anxiety.

Hindriks’ vision is to help each of these three sides use a “TurboTax for immigration” to streamline the process. Jobbatical now can handle immigration applications in Estonia, Germany, and Spain and hopes to add Finland early next year.

But the more ambitious vision is ultimately to help governments drive their processes faster. Similar to how, say, the U.S. tax agency the Internal Revenue Service offers eFiling, Hindriks sees a future where Jobbatical can help facilitate immigration filings and massively speed up the efficiency of governments around these processes by allowing workers to directly submit applications to the government. She is working with two countries today to create exactly these sorts of digital submission systems.

It’s a space that has heated up in recent years as immigration continues to flow across the world. Boundless, for instance, helps individuals apply for U.S. green cards. Jobbatical is focused on the B2B market, focused on companies with global workforces.

Despite the deep debate in many countries over immigration, the reality is that every country has skills deficits that can be helped with smart and efficient immigration. Jobbatical is one company that may make the system more fair and relaxing for stressed workers looking to build their international careers.