Employee survey startup Culture Amp closes $82M round led by Sequoia China

Each unhappy startup may be unhappy in its own way, but there’s still wisdom in understanding what drives employee satisfaction and dissatisfaction across companies.

Culture Amp is just one of the companies aiming to help employees anonymously express how they feel about their place of work, but the Melbourne company is using the anonymized employee survey data from thousands of customers to help them learn from each other and chart which initiatives made a dent.

The eight-year-old startup has picked up a new bout of funding to help it extend its base of customers further.

Culture Amp just closed a sizable $82 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital China with participation from Sapphire Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Index Ventures, Blackbird Ventures, Hostplus, Skip Capital, Grok Ventures, Global Founders Capital and TDM Growth Partners.

The company’s Series E doubles the company’s total funding raised to date, which now sits at $158 million. Culture Amp closed its last major round of funding — a $40 million Series D — in July of last year.

The company’s subscription survey software gives customers all of the templates, questions and analytics that they need to track employee sentiment and visualize the data that they get back. The software can be used for things like quarterly engagement surveys, but it can also power performance reviews, goal-setting and self-reflections.

Employee surveys are certainly nothing revolutionary, but Culture Amp is trying to improve the process by helping its customers start to bring anonymous feedback to the team level so that employees can give more direct feedback to their managers.

CEO Didier Elzinga tells me the company now has 2,500 customers with a collective 3 million Culture Amp employee surveys under their belts. Elzinga tells TechCrunch that harnessing the collective intelligence of its network to predict things like employee turnover is perhaps one of its strongest value propositions.

“Once you understand the experience that people are having, once you know where you should focus, how do we actually help you act on it?” he tells TechCrunch. “A large part is bringing to bear the collective intelligence of the thousands of companies we already have so that you can learn from people that have suffered from the same sorts of problems.”

The 400-person company’s customers include McDonald’s, Salesforce, Slack and Airbnb.

Source. TechCrunch, Lucas Matney, September 3,  2019

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Gusto Raises $200M Series D At $3.8B Valuation To Power HR Within Small Businesses

SaaS company Gusto announced this morning it has raised a $200 million Series D that values the company at $3.8 billion post-money – nearly double what it was valued at when it raised its $140 million Series C one year ago.

New investors include Fidelity Management & Research Co. and also Generation Investment Management, which is Al Gore’s UK-based firm that is focused on sustainable investing. Existing investors T. Rowe Price Associates Inc., Dragoneer Investment Group, and General Catalyst, also participated in the round. With this latest financing, Gusto has now raised more than $516 million since it was founded in 2012.

Gusto’s self-described “people platform” addresses a number of HR-related functions including providing services around payroll, employee onboarding, time tracking, retirement, and increasingly, health insurance. It also offers team management tools.

The San Francisco-based Y-Combinator backed company plans to use the money in part to double its headcount in its Denver office, grow its team in the Bay Area and open up a new R&D office in New York. Currently, Gusto has over 1,000 employees with its four-year-old Denver office being its largest with a staff of over 600, according to CEO and co-founder Josh Reeves. The growth in the number of its employees has been in the 50 percent range most years, he added.

“We’re excited about being in NY, and that’s all about accessing more technical talent, particularly in the financial services area, but also in general in the city’s growing tech ecosystem,” Reeves told Crunchbase News.

Gusto also plans to use its new capital to “double down on research and development” of its platform. Looking ahead, the company plans to invest more in its fintech and healthcare offerings. Its overarching goal is to help smaller companies have the same ability to provide “robust benefits” as larger companies do.

“A big area of investment for us is flexible pay, and helping individuals in how they approach finances,” Reeves said. “It’s also really important to us to help small businesses give their employees easier access to healthcare. Overall, we want to be a force for universal healthcare.”

Indeed, that was a key factor for Generation.

Gusto has “made health coverage available to many who would otherwise not have access to it,” said Shalini Rao, director in growth equity at Generation, in a written statement.

As part of the funding, Gusto also announced its first independent board member in Anne Raimondi, who also currently serves on the board of Asana, a work management platform. She also was SVP of operations at Zendesk as it worked its way to an IPO.

The addition of Raimondi led me to ask Reeves if Gusto was also looking to enter the public arena. “Being a public company is not a matter of if, but when,” he told Crunchbase News. “We’re weighing the pros and cons and I’m confident the pros will outweigh the cons.”

Gusto also recently announced a batch of new hires including former Google chief diversity + inclusion officer Danielle Brown who joined as chief people officer. Also,

former Square CISO (Chief Information and Security Officer) Fredrick Leerecently came on board as Gusto’s new CISO.

Earlier this year, the company passed its 100,000 customer mark. Customers are in a range of industries including bakeries, flower shops, cafes, churches and hotels. Gusto makes its money by charging a monthly subscription fee. It earns more revenue as a company grows or uses more of its services, said Reeves.

All of Gusto’s customers are in the U.S. but it’s looking to expand internationally over time, according to Reeves.

“For now, we’re very focused on the domestic audience,” he said.

“There are six million employers in the U.S. and 98 percent are in the 1-100 employee range. So there’s millions of more businesses to try and go help. There’s still a huge opportunity there.”

Source. Crunchbase News, Mary Ann Azevedo, July 24, 2019

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PayFit raises $79 million for its payroll service

French startup PayFit is raising a new $79 million funding round (€70 million) from Eurazeo and Bpifrance. The company first started with a payroll service for small and medium companies in France. It has evolved into a full-fledged HR solution for multiple European countries.

PayFit uses a software-as-a-service approach so that small companies can easily manage payroll and HR information from a web browser. Everything stays up-to-date and compliant with labor regulation.

After you enter information about your employees, PayFit automatically generates pay slips every month. Your employees receive an email when their pay slips are ready. If somebody is getting a raise, you can connect to your PayFit account and modify an amount for all pay slips going forward.

When it comes to payroll taxes, the service automatically reminds you when you have to pay them and how much you’re supposed to pay. You also can generate exports for your accountant, see reports about your staff, etc.

And PayFit doesn’t want to stop at payrolls. You also can manage absences and leaves, expense reports and shifts. It makes sense to build those tools in-house as they have a direct effect on your payroll.

In order to approve expense reports and vacation days, you also can build an organizational chart in PayFit and decide who’s managing who.

While it’s easy to build an HR giant in the U.S., it’s a bit more complicated in Europe, as labor laws vary so much from one country to another. But the startup has managed to launch its service in France, Spain, Germany and the U.K. — Italy is coming soon.

The company says that it has developed its own programming language called Jetlang in order to transform labor code into computer code.

There are 3,000 companies relying on PayFit and 300 people working for the company. With today’s funding round, PayFit plans to double its workforce by 2020.

Source. TechCrunch, Romain Dillet, June 17, 2019

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