Top 25 HR startups who are getting it right
25 of the best HR startups who are helping make your employee management manageable!
HR managers love Boomf!
There. We said it – but only because it is true.
Why? Because Boomf makes staff gifting and incentivising so easy, that’s why.
Boomf has a lot of interaction with a lot of HR companies and departments – getting called on to supply a wide variety of amazing corporate gifts.
So naturally, we end up speaking regularly to many of them.
Stuck for an original idea for something different for your staff? We have you covered. From amazing MallowPops (personalised of course) to Boomf Bombs, and a range of great gifts in between, Boomf has corporate gifting sorted.
From observation, we know that the hard work of HR managers and departments often goes unrecognised. It’s a tough calling, and far more important to business than people realise. HR is the lifeblood of the workforce.
To help your HR department, some amazing startups have appeared, many in recent years, to take the strain and help you create an amazing HR experience for your staff and/or freelancers.
A healthy work environment results in a happier workforce, better productivity and higher satisfaction for everyone.
Here is a roundup of 25 HR startups making your life easier and your workforce happier.
Appraisd
The brains: Roly Walter
The HQ: London, UK - since 2004
The letterbox: sales@appraisd.com
The lowdown:
Appraisd is an enterprise SaaS HR employee development and engagement tool with goals, feedback, reviews, check-ins and more. They are an employee-first online performance management system that helps organisations get the best from their people. Used by enterprises and companies of all sizes, Appraisd will improve the performance culture in your business. Well respected in the industry, they take the concepts of performance reviews, feedback and goal-setting and deliver results – not just for the company – but for employees and managers alike.
BarRaiser
The HQ: Burlingame, California, USA - since 2020
The bottom line: $4.2m capital raised
The letterbox: contact@barraiser.com
The lowdown:
Raise your talent bar with every hire. The BarRaiser smart interview platform empowers you to build a high-quality team, faster. Their industry experts evaluate the skills, domain knowledge and aptitude of your potential hires using BarRaiser AI, and allow you to standardise your interview process and engineer a great candidate experience when hiring!
Beamery
The brains: Abakar Saidov, Michael Paterson, Sultan Murad Saidov
The HQ: London, UK - since 2014
The bottom line: $173m capital raised
The letterbox: info@beamery.com
The lowdown:
Beamery is talent lifecycle management, which enables you to create more human experiences for everyone – and unlock the skills and potential of your global workforce. Beamery is a talent acquisition, engagement, and retention platform that manages sourcing, hiring, and retaining of your people, built on AI-driven insights that empower you to transform and shape your total talent strategy – on a global scale.
Bonusly
The brains: John Quinn, Raphael Crawford-Marks
The HQ: Boulder, Colorado, USA - since 2012
The bottom line: $12.5m capital raised
The letterbox: raphael@bonus.ly
The lowdown:
Bonusly is an engaging recognition and rewards platform that enriches your company culture. It makes recognition more impactful by connecting it to your company’s core values and giving visibility to everyone’s contributions. Bonusly encourages frequent and timely recognition, by integrating with the communication tools your employees use every day, creating a recognition-rich culture, and allowing for easy-to-manage recognition and reward programs.
BrightHR
The brains: Paul Tooth
The HQ: Manchester, UK - since 2015
The letterbox: digital-marketing@brighthr.com
The lowdown:
BrightHR's simple to use software enables you to plan and share staff rotas, manage staff holidays, approval requests, sickness and lateness in a click - and the mobile app means you can do this from anywhere! BrightHR provides unlimited cloud storage for HR documents, so you can ditch the filing cabinet and be confident that you have everything in one place. Also included is a free clocking in/out app that is the perfect way for SMEs to track staff working hours. One simple to use app and QR codes allows staff to 'blip' in and out, and automatically generates a log of who is in your workplace at any point. BrightHR now also manages staff expenses and approval with ease – and has much more built-in.
Charlie
The brains: Ben Gateley, Rob O'Donovan, Tom Carrington Smith
The HQ: London, UK - since 2015
The bottom line: $1.4m capital raised
The letterbox: help@charliehr.com
The lowdown:
Charlie describes itself as the HR software for small teams with big ideas. It provides everything you need to manage your team and craft your culture. Collate all your team’s data in one place, securely, run engagement surveys, administer perks packages and more. At the same time, Charlie takes care of all your more usual HR tasks, such as reviews and feedback, time-off processing and approval and so on.
Credly
The brains: Jonathan Finkelstein
The HQ: New York, USA - since 2012
The bottom line: $18.2m capital raised
The letterbox: info@credly.com
The lowdown:
A digital credentialing company, Credly is a platform for verifying, sharing, and managing digital badges and credentials. They help communicate people’s knowledge, skills, and abilities. Employers, training organizations, certification programs and many more use Credly to help individuals translate their learning experiences into professional opportunities using trusted digital credentials.
EnterpriseAlumni
The brains: Emma Sinclair, James Sinclair
The HQ: Los Angeles, USA - since 2014
The letterbox: info@enterprisealumni.com
The lowdown:
EnterpriseAlumni is a management platform for creating and running alumni and retiree communities. Corporate alumni are the largest source of pre-vetted, pre-qualified and accessible talent – so create a community and keep in touch with them! This will also help you to drive recruitment, as well as improve your business development and brand advocacy.
Flare
The brains: Colin Mierowsky, Daniel Cohen, James Windon, Jan Pacas, Saul Kaplan
The HQ: Sydney, NSW, Australia - since 2015
The bottom line: A$50m capital raised
The letterbox: info@flarehr.com
The lowdown:
Take care of your people and business – for free! Flare provides free workplace solutions to Australian businesses that want to level up their workplace wellness and employee experience programs. Get employee onboarding, benefits and wellness, and financial wellbeing solutions for your workplace, completely free. Digitally onboard new employees with 85% greater efficiency, with compliant, paperless onboarding, which seamlessly integrates with your existing tools.
Hive
The brains: John Ryder
The HQ: Newcastle upon Tyne, UK - since 2015
The bottom line: £2.1m capital raised
The letterbox: info@hive.hr
The lowdown:
Hive helps your employee’s voices be heard by harnessing their feedback and allowing you to make data-driven decisions about the future of your organisation. Their flexible employee feedback platform provides an agile and intuitive alternative for your HR team. With the development of what they call Hive People Science, and a range of powerful, flexible tools, you can drive real cultural and organisational change by understanding and listening to your employees.
Humaans
The brains: Giovanni Luperti, Karolis Narkevicius
The HQ: London, UK - since 2020
The bottom line: $5m capital raised
The letterbox: teams@humaans.io
The lowdown:
HR startup Humaans describe themselves as the fastest way to onboard and manage your staff. Founded in 2020, it is an HR Information System that helps you manage, grow and onboard your team. It was created with full integration in mind – so will work with your current systems – and provides document storage, vacation tracking, reporting and a staff directory. And it works – beautifully.
InsideBoard
The brains: Michaël Bentolila, Yohan Bentolila
The HQ: Neuilly-sur-Seine, France - since 2014
The bottom line: $32m capital raised
The letterbox: paris@insideboard.com
The lowdown:
InsideBoard describes itself as the first AI digital platform for change management - an all-in-one digital platform to drive a 100% successful transformation of your business, from onboarding to adoption. To help you achieve higher performance and ROI, and for more business collaboration, agility, efficiency and growth.
Instaffo
The brains: Christoph Zoeller, Daniel Schaefer
The HQ: Heidelberg, Germany - since 2014
The bottom line: €5.5m capital raised
The letterbox: info@instaffo.de
The lowdown:
Instaffo sees the person behind the C.V. Their AI-powered recruitment software looks beyond candidate resumes, creating better matches and more fulfilling work experiences. No more time-consuming applications – their unbiased and anonymous process quickly advances the right people straight to your interview stage. Instaffo is a fully automated recruiting platform and career service for companies and ambitious professionals.
Intrro
The brains: Nasser Oudjidane, Neel J Shah
The HQ: London, UK - since 2019
The bottom line: $2.8m capital raised
The letterbox: help@intrro.com
The lowdown:
Intrro matches the best talent in your employee's network to your jobs, automating introductions directly to your inbox. It reduces your time cold prospecting, allowing your recruitment process to be more productive, as well as increasing hiring manager satisfaction. Intrro is a collaboration tool for key professional relationships at your company, so you can hire more candidates by using the insights of co-workers to help inform better hiring decisions.
Kalido
The brains: Ashvin Sologar, Sanjay Varma, Vikas Sagar
The HQ: London, UK - since 2014
The bottom line: $12.1m capital raised
The letterbox: info@kalido.me
The lowdown:
Fuelling people-powered enterprise, Kalido is an amazing AI-powered platform that matches enterprise workforce skills and strengths to people, teams, projects and jobs. Kalido maximises organisational and societal prosperity through AI-powered people and opportunity matching, and was chosen by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer for 2020.
Newton Labs
The brains: Helder Silva, Rui Coats
The HQ: Santa Clara, California, USA - since 2018
The bottom line: $400k capital raised
The lowdown:
Ready for a whole new way of hiring talent? By combining deep learning algorithms and natural language processing, Newton helps employers hire talents, by matching candidates with a 98% accuracy. Its HR experts screen all of the top-matched candidates to ensure optimal accuracy in their recommendations, and sets up a smooth follow-up for you. By harnessing the power of AI and combining it with human expertise, Newton cuts recruitment costs for companies by over 80%.
Personio
The brains: Arseniy Vershinin, Hanno Renner, Ignaz Forstmeier, Roman Schumacher
The HQ: München, Germany - since 2015
The bottom line: $524m capital raised
The letterbox: info@persinio.de
The lowdown:
Personio is the People Operating System, which allows HR to go beyond HR. Personio is all your HR processes in one tool, which helps you streamline your processes, save time and money, and transform your HR department. The platform enables you to store and manage all employee data and HR processes in one place, including vacation and sick days, approvals, salary, attendance, employee documents, performance, reporting,
and employee on-boarding. Its recruiting function comprises applicant tracking, interview scheduling, candidate reviews, and many other features.
Reward Gateway
The brains: Chris Whitcombe, Glenn Elliot
The HQ: Boston, Massachusetts, USA - since 2006
The bottom line: $3.2m capital raised
The letterbox: hello@rewardgateway.com
The lowdown:
Connect, recognise and support your people, to help you win the war for talent! Reward Gateway is a SaaS platform that helps you attract, engage and retain the best people with an employee engagement platform that brings employee benefits, discounts and perks, reward and recognition, employee wellbeing, employee communications and employee feedback – all in one unified hub.
Simppler
The brains: Shikhar Mishra, Vipul Sharma
The HQ: San Mateo, California, USA - since 2013
The bottom line: $3.2m capital raised
The letterbox: hello@simppler.com
The lowdown:
Simppler is an intelligent employee referral platform, which helps you to scale, manage and track your referral hiring! It can turbocharge your employee referral recruitment, giving you faster, more cost-effective hiring, better business performance and lower attrition. Making productive hires is often the difference between success and failure, so take every advantage you can.
Sparrow
The brains: Deborah Hanus, Samarth Keshava
The HQ: San Francisco, California, USA - since 2018
The bottom line: $20m capital raised
The letterbox: hi@trysparrow.com
The lowdown:
Finally – stress-free employee leave! Leave compliance is complicated. Sparrow is not. Sparrow is a fast-growing software startup based in San Francisco. Its mission is to make it simple for companies to provide their employees with all kinds of leave (i.e. family, medical, etc.)
TalentDesk.io
The brains: Dessisslav Kamenov, Lilia Stoyanov
The HQ: London, UK - since 2015
The bottom line: $406.3k capital raised
The letterbox: office@transformify.org
The lowdown:
TalentDesk.io is a secure, cloud-based platform developed for organisations that need to engage and manage their freelancer or contractor workforce. Put simply, TalentDesk.io is a Freelancer Management System, par excellence. TalentDesk allows you to work with contractors anytime, anywhere. It is a fully searchable contractor network platform, with features such as one-click multi-currency payments, secure document storage, instant work allocation and much more. Talentdesk.io is talent on tap.
Tamigo
The brains: Jakob Toftgaard
The HQ: Copenhagen, Denmark - since 2006
The bottom line: €9.3m capital raised
The letterbox: sales@tamigo.com
The lowdown:
Tamigo is a cloud-based solution that combines scheduling, absence management, performance, employee communication, HR, finance and forecasting and more in one solution. Since 2006, Tamigo has been a vital business partner for small to medium-sized companies as well as international enterprises – predominantly within retail and hospitality. Tamigo revolutionises workforce management through smart processes, new insights and a unique alignment on improving future performance. Optimise your operations and staff management, increase sales, reduce labour costs, automate workflows and empower your employees through effective communication.
Tandemploy, by Phenom
The brains: Anna Kaiser, Jana Tepe
The HQ: Berlin, Germany - since 2013
The bottom line: $4.4m capital raised
The letterbox: info@tandemploy.com
The lowdown:
Now acquired by Phenom, Tandemploy is a Berlin-based HR tech company focused on solving key problems associated with employee experiences. Break down silos and connect knowledge islands – Tandemploy’s powerful matching algorithm recommends pairings among peers, mentors, project leaders, and subject matter experts by analysing skills-based data and individual goals.
TFY
The brains: Xenios Thrasyvoulou
The HQ: London, UK - since 2017
The letterbox: support@talentdesk.io
The lowdown:
Transformify enables you to hire, manage and pay international contractors and freelancers from a single platform. Work with thousands of freelancers and contractors around the globe – but receive invoices and make payments to just one – TFY. More than just an on-demand global payroll system, it helps you onboard, manage and pay their workforce and service providers. It offers full automation of billing and cross-border payments, including in more than 20 cryptocurrencies, across 184 countries.
Workable
The brains: Nikos Moraitakis, Spyros Magiatis
The HQ: Boston, Massachusetts, USA - since 2012
The bottom line: $84.2m capital raised
The letterbox: sales@workable.com
The lowdown:
Make the right hires faster, with the world’s leading recruitment software – find the attract candidates, move the right applicants forward and make the best hire – in half the time. Workable is a recruitment platform which helps you get from requisition to offer letter faster, via AI-powered tools that streamline your recruitment process.
Data from: crunchbase.com
Correct at time of posting
