The role of HR professionals grew during the pandemic as companies were forced to navigate major changes in the workplace, such as working from home. Unsurprisingly, these professionals have had some of the highest burnout rates in the past two years, especially as HR departments remain understaffed. According to an August survey of work vivoan employee collaboration app, 95% of HR employees say they have felt overwhelmed in the past six months, while 73% felt undervalued by their employers.
Part of the reason HR work is so demanding today is the lack of effective tools to help make aspects of the work a reality, says Giovanni Luperti. He is the CEO of Humane, an HR tech startup that helps organizations build a customizable HR stack that manages employee documents, data, payroll, contracts, and other components of “people ops.” Luperti has a product to pitch. And it’s true that other HR technology providers offer similar – if not comparable – solutions, such as Darwinbox, iBob, BambooHR, and Personio. But Luperti argues that Humanaans takes a fundamentally different approach to unifying disparate HR tools.
“Our goal is to enable companies to operate with the flexibility, connectivity and tools that work best for them, rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all approach to human activities and business processes that evolve every day. he told ukbusinessupdates.com. in an email conversation. “HR teams need more effective processes and integrated systems to proactively help modern organizations support their workforce. We built Humans to… bring the entire HR stack together and automate processes like onboarding, offboarding and more to streamline workflows.”
Image Credits: Humane
Luperti was previously director of product design at Quibit and founded Humane in 2020 with Karolis Narkevicius, who is also a Quibit veteran. The two wanted to “build something meaningful” in a very large market, Luperti said, after realizing that HR tools had traditionally been clunky, slow, and not designed to provide a great user experience.
in 2021, based in London Humane has raised $5 million in seed funding from Y Combinator and Angels, including former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. More recently — today to be exact — the startup closed a $15 million Series A round led by Lachy Groom with the participation of notable individual investors Tobias Lutke (a co-founder of Shopify) and Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. .
Humans is designed to capture employee data by storing personal and company documents (e.g. identification, emergency contacts and basic profiles), making it ostensibly easier to track down missing data points. The platform keeps track of things such as trial periods and which employees move in and out, but also birthdays and anniversaries, expired IDs and absence and holiday hours. In addition, Humane can reflect changes in the workforce by department, tenure, and salary expenditures and trends, such as when employees typically took PTO.
“[W]We found that IT and tech stakeholders want to avoid duplication and automate the flow of employee data stored across the multiple platforms in their technology stack. This is where our unique model can support them,” said Luperti. “Our current focus is on faster and more efficient access to data at scale, and we are investing in new capabilities that will support organizations to work better cross-functionally.”
Image Credits: Humane
To this end, Humanaans has added connectors for platforms such as Slack, DocuSign, Okta, Greenhouse, Google Workspace, Pento, Contractbook and Workable over the past year. With a customer base that includes brands including: Pleo, Fidel API, Manyone, Pento and Birdie, Luperti says Humanaans will double down in the coming months in “consolidating” its presence in the UK and expanding into the wider EU market, while investing further in product development and personnel.
“We have reached important milestones and experienced meaningful growth over the past 12 months. There is clarity about what we want to achieve beyond better serving growing SMEs and mid-sized businesses, and we felt the time was right to accelerate further,” he added, refusing specific questions about revenue and workforce. to answer: “Our goal is to build a resilient business that can support customers and their employees for the long term.”
Undoubtedly, Humanes is benefiting from the general enthusiasm of investors around HR tech startups. In 2021, venture capitalists funneled more than $12.3 billion into HR tech startups, about 3.6 times the amount invested in 2020, according to PitchBook Data. that trend continued in 2022, with mega deals that saw more than $1.4 billion invested in the sector in the first two months alone.
Macroeconomic conditions could eventually put an end to the boom. But for now, Humans — and startups like it — seem to have a healthy runway.
