ENTERING NEW MARKETS & TRANSFORMING THE WAY BUSINESSES ENGAGE WITH EMPLOYEES
We’re excited to announce that hiBob has just raised $17.5 million in series A funding. This latest investment round is led by the US-based Battery Ventures with additional participation from Eight Roads Ventures (the proprietary investment arm of Fidelity International Limited) and Arbor Ventures, as well as Bessemer Venture Partners, who led our seed round of $7.5 Million in June 2016.
Today’s series A announcement, one of the largest of its kind in the UK, brings our total funding to $25 million to date.
THE BIG PICTURE
“Our vision is to transform the way businesses engage with their employees and empower HR to be at the forefront of this fundamental change,” said Ronni Zehavi, Co-founder and CEO of hiBob. “We see mobile and social media, the growing Millennial workforce and cloud technologies as major forces for this long-needed innovation. We are honored to have raised additional investment from VCs who were part of our seed round and welcome new visionaries on our journey to reshape the way businesses understand and interact with their employees.”
In today’s market, great employees are harder to find, want more from their employers, and are harder to retain. When this is combined with increasing legislation around benefits (such as the workplace pension), it’s clear to see why HR teams are drowning in admin and want to spend more time looking after their employees.
“Employee engagement correlates strongly with business performance,” said Melissa Guzy, Partner at Arbor Ventures“. Motivation and collaboration are key drivers of success in today’s work environment, that demands ever-increasing levels of innovation, creativity and cooperation across global teams, especially with the rise of the micro multinational.
HiBob dramatically simplifies the HR compliance process, through their creative and engaging technology, which is already making waves in the UK. We look forward to their ongoing success as they expand globally, especially in Asia-Pacific.”
A BUSY YEAR SINCE LAUNCH
Since our UK launch in 2016, we have increased our client base to include companies such as Wieden+Kennedy and Receipt Bank, amongst hundreds of others serving thousands of employees.
We’ve also grown our management team to include veteran entrepreneurs and industry leaders, and deepened our technology and operations.
Along the way, we’re honoured to have won ‘most promising company of the year’ at the UK-Israeli Business Awards, and to have been listed as one of RealBusiness.co.uk’s Future 50 ‘most innovative companies’.
“hibob’s unique team is addressing some very real, outdated challenges in the workplace.” said Saul Klein, Partner at LocalGlobe. “Those organisations that understand their people better and use their insights wisely, will outperform those that don’t. HiBob is providing an extremely robust and innovative solution to this massive opportunity.”
WHAT NEXT?
This additional funding will fuel the next phase of our growth that will continue to strengthen our core HR and Benefits technology, increase sales by helping SMEs streamline their end-to-end HR process, build strategic partnerships with employee benefits leaders in the ecosystem, address evolving regulatory requirements, and expand our operations globally by the end of 2017.
“HR is evolving from a compliance-only function to a strategic business role” said Scott Tobin, General Partner at Battery Ventures. “It needs to be able to consolidate and simplify its administrative responsibilities so that it can be freed up to convert the energy and passion that young people arrive with into long-term engagement. We believe HiBob’s highly experienced team has an intrinsic understanding of how to address these core issues that businesses must solve.”
GROWTH INTO NEW MARKETS
Currently, the hiBob team is made up of 50 people in the UK and Israel, and we have hundreds of companies in the UK who are actively using our platform. With the recent announcement of our partnership with one of the UK’s leading pension providers, Aviva, we’re extending our solution to millions of businesses that need to auto-enroll their staff with a pension plan in 2017. We’re now planning to grow to 80 employees and expand our operations to the US, Asia-Pacific, and in Israel in 2017.
“HiBob has attracted a loyal following from HR teams, by replacing the chaos of multiple linked spreadsheets with an easy-to-use tool that engages with employees as names not numbers,” said Davor Hebel, Managing Partner at Eight Roads Ventures Europe. “This is a sector with great scope for innovation and we’re thrilled to be working with Ronni and his very talented and experienced team.”
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From Joanna Pardo
Joanna is a journalist and a passionate advocate for Social Media. She truly believes the more digital we become, the more human we must be. Social media gives people the chance to feel part of a community and create genuine human connections.
