HR automation platform Omni HR has announced that it has secured $2.4 million in pre-seed funding from Alpha JWC Ventures & Picus Capital. 

Alpha JWC has invested in various leading Southeast Asian startups including Ajaib, Carro and Spenmo, while Picus Capital has extensive experience investing in HR tech companies such as Personio, Bennie and Workmotion.

Jefrey Joe, Co-Founder and General Partner at Alpha JWC Ventures said, “Omni is building an end-to-end HR suite that covers the entire employee life cycle and automates the repetitive workflow to help the management handle their people operations. With solutions that cater to problems faced by most, if not all, kinds of companies, we believe Omni HR has the unique potential to grow fast and become the region's HR SaaS of choice.”

Florian Reichert, Partner & Managing Director at Picus Capital said, “While the HR function is the most crucial one in every business, we believe that the Southeast Asian market is still a white space with no comprehensive and localised tool to manage a workforce efficiently and offer a strong employee experience. Omni HR has built a clearly superior solution by going beyond basic administrative functionality into automating repetitive workflows like onboarding in the HR departments. This need has been especially accelerated by an increasing number of software being used in a company and an increasingly remote workforce which is harder to manage with traditional IT infrastructure.”

The HR firm was founded in 2021 by former Goldman Sachs executive Brian Ip and experienced data engineer YC Chan with the aim to provide a seamless employee management system that helps companies digitise and automate the end-to-end employee lifecycle in a single platform.

With the pre-seed funding, the firm will further enhance its all-in-one product offering, including the launch of a recruitment module by Q3 and a performance management module by Q4, respectively.

Since its soft launch in March 2022, Omni HR has been adopted by a number of companies to automate manual HR processes such as employee onboarding, time off management, and document management.

Omni HR Co-Founder Brian Ip commented, “Most companies in Southeast Asia are currently using local HR software that supports only basic admin functions, leaving many HR processes to be done manually. Meanwhile, HR software is one of the software categories that require the most localization, due to the differing employment rules in different countries. This effectively creates a unique opportunity for local players to build a modern, scalable employee management platform based out of Southeast Asia.”

Omni HR Co-Founder YC Chan said, “Our initial traction has been promising and we're off to a great start. We are better than incumbents not only because of our superior tech solutions, but also because of our understanding of the local context which enables us to design a product fitting our customer needs.”