German HR startup Personio raises $270 million funding, launches new software

Personio, Europe’s  HR software company for small and mid-sized businesses, has announced People Workflow Automation, a new category of software.

SMEs will now be able to transform manual and fragmented people processes into automated workflows that span across the entire organization and all its applications, removing painful delays and helping to realize opportunities.

 Tied to its vision for the new category, Personio has raised pre-emptive Series E funding of $270 million, valuing the company at $6.3 billion.

The Series E funding adds to significant reserves from Personio’s last funding round in January 2021, bringing the total capital raised to over $500M. The investment allows Personio to evolve its product to lead the People Workflow Automation category and continue to execute its long-term oriented strategy, focused on the needs of its customers.

The latest funding round was led by Greenoaks Capital Partners, with participation from Altimeter Capital and Alkeon. These three funds are united by their strategy of investing in category-leading companies across their public and private journeys, for the long term. Their portfolios include many notable software companies such as UiPath, Hubspot, Stripe and Snowflake. Personio’s existing investors – Index Ventures, Accel, Meritech, Lightspeed, Northzone and Global Founders Capital – all also invested again, underlining the strength of Personio’s vision and its strong growth trajectory.

Hanno Renner, Co-founder and CEO Personio: “This investment highlights the continued fast growth of the business and the immense market potential, but also the belief in our vision for the future of HR tech. While I consider this funding a major milestone, we are still at the very beginning of our journey. Now we want to help HR teams go beyond HR. Launching the People Workflow Automation category is a big step forward along this path, serving the most important asset of any business, its people. We are excited to see Europe’s SMEs thrive as they make use of this technology.”

Neil Mehta, Founder and Managing Partner of Greenoaks: “While small businesses are the backbone of the European economy, they have been underserved and overlooked by legacy players for too long. Personio democratizes enterprise capabilities and delivers a step change in productivity, simplifying HR workflows across the full employee lifecycle.

We are lucky to be partners with many of the leading private technology companies in the world, and I am confident that the Personio team is just getting started on their mission. Launching the People Workflow Automation category will deliver even more value to businesses across Europe. We are proud to join Personio at this thrilling stage of their journey and look forward to being partners for many years to come.”

Businesses of all sizes rushed to digitize in reaction to the pandemic, with SMEs now using an average of 40+ applications, many of which consume HR data or relate to people processes. Large enterprises can mitigate the impact of fragmented applications by combining products from a variety of software companies (such as Workday, ServiceNow and Uipath) with in-house IT resources and consultancies to build custom workflow automation. In contrast, most SMEs do not have the resources, technical expertise or availability of suitable technology to build their own automated workflows.

This fragmentation of processes and applications leads to wasted time, delays and missed opportunities for both employers and employees alike. For example, a business may miss out on talent if a hiring manager is unable to rapidly issue a contract to a prospective employee. Likewise, a business could be at risk of a data breach if an employee leaves and the IT team does not manually revoke access to applications in time.

People Workflow Automation solves this by automating people processes across all applications and teams in an organisation. Changes such as terminations, team changes, promotions, location changes and sick leave requests happen frequently at any organization. Each triggers a workflow Personio can help streamline, avoiding those painful delays that lead to missed opportunities, while also freeing up time for HR teams, managers and employees. HR teams can easily manage issues that in the past would have involved manual tasks across multiple departments.

Katarina Berg, CHRO, Spotify and Board Member of Personio: “HR teams have been constrained by having to work across different tools, departments and stakeholders for too long. At Spotify we have the scale to build our own platforms to mitigate these issues, but HR counterparts in SMEs do not have the resources to do likewise. People Workflow Automation democratizes an important technology trend that will have a significant impact and allow HR to go beyond HR. It’s a fantastic development for the industry.”

Together with the launch of the category Personio has released several new features that will allow its customers to benefit from workflow automation. Those include integration of collaboration platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, as well as integrations with identity manager providers such as Okta or MS Azure Active Directory, as well as a Workflow Hub where HR teams can oversee status and delays across all their workflows.

www.personio.com