The role of HR professionals has been expanding widely as companies are forced to explore changes in major workplaces such as working from home. Unsurprisingly, those professionals have had some of the highest burnout rates in the last couple of years, especially as HR departments are under-resourced. According to an August survey by Workvivo, an employee collaboration app, 95% of HR workers said they were stressed out in the past six months, and 73% felt undervalued by their employers.
According to Giovanni Luperti, the reason HR works today is because of the lack of effective tools to help it perform its job. He is the CEO of Humans, a human technology startup that enables organizations to build a customizable HR stack that manages employee documents, data, payroll, contracts and other elements of “people ops.” Luperti has a product to jump. And it’s true that other HR technology vendors offer similar — if not comparable — solutions, such as Darwinbox, iBob, BambooHR, and Personio. But Luperti says Humans takes a fundamentally different approach to unifying various HR tools.
“Our goal is to allow companies to work with flexibility, connectivity and tools, rather than forcing people to do one-off processes and company-building processes that are evolving every day,” he told TechCrunch. Email interview. “Human resources teams need more efficient processes and integrated systems to proactively help modern organizations support their workforce. We built Human Resources … to bring the entire workforce stack together and automate processes to streamline workflows like on-boarding, off-boarding and more.”
Image Credits: Humanity
Previously Director of Product Design at Quibit, Luperti co-founded Humans in 2020 with Karolis Narkevicius, a Quibit veteran. Both set out to “build something meaningful” in a very large market, Luperti, after realizing that HR tools have historically been clunky, slow and not designed to provide a good user experience.
In 2021, Based in London Humans has raised $5 million in seed funding from angels including Y Combinator and former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. Recently – today, to be exact – the startup has participated in a $15 million Series A round led by Lachy Groom, with notable investors Tobias Luttke (co-founder of Shopify) and Slack CEO Stuart Butterfield.
Humans is designed to capture employee details by storing personal and company documents (such as ID, emergency contacts and basic profiles) and makes it easy to identify seemingly missing data points. The platform tracks things like probationary periods and which employees are joining and leaving, as well as birthdays and years of employment, expired IDs, and vacation and leave hours. Beyond that, Human Resources can show trends in departmental headcount changes, tenure and salary costs, and when employees typically take PTO.
“[W]We’ve seen IT and tech stakeholders want to automate the flow of employee data stored across multiple platforms in the technology stack to avoid duplication of effort. This is where our unique model can support them,” Luperti said. “Our focus is on faster and more efficient access to data, and we’re investing in new capabilities that help organizations do their jobs better.”
Image Credits: Humanity
To that end, Humans has added connectors to platforms like Slack, DocuSign, Okta, Greenhouse, Google Workspace, Pento, Contractbook, and Workable over the past year. with a customer base including brands Pleo, Fidel API, Manyone, Pento and Birdie, Luperti Humans says it will double its UK presence in the next few months by expanding into the wider EU market and investing in product development and recruitment.
“Over the past 12 months, we’ve made meaningful progress by hitting important milestones. There’s clarity on what we want to do next to better serve small to mid-sized enterprises and mid-market companies, and we feel the time is right to accelerate further,” he added – exclusive to Revenue and Headcount. Refusal to answer questions: “Our goal is to build a strong business that can support customers and their employees for the long term.”
Undoubtedly, Humans is benefiting from the general investor enthusiasm surrounding artificial intelligence startups. In the year In 2021, venture investors poured more than $12.3 billion into HR technology startups, which is about 3.6 times the amount invested in 2020, according to Pitchbook data. That trend continued in 2022, with megadeals investing more than $1.4 billion in the sector in the first two months alone.
Macroeconomic conditions may eventually halt growth. But for now, Human — and startups like it — seem to have a healthy runway.
