News: German startup Personio raises $125 MN

Funding & Investment

German startup Personio raises $125 MN

The HR software startup, Personio has picked up $125 MN in funding at a $1.7 BN post-money valuation.
German startup Personio raises $125 MN

The German startup that targets small- and medium-sized businesses (10-2,000 employees) with an all-in-one HR platform covering recruiting and onboarding, payroll, absence tracking, and other major HR functions — has picked up $125 million in funding at a $1.7 billion post-money valuation.

The Series D is being co-led by Index Ventures and Meritech, with previous backers Accel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northzone, Global Founders Capital, and Picus all participating.

The $1.7 BN valuations is a big jump on the company’s $500 MN valuations a year ago, and it comes after a year where the startup has doubled its revenues and was not on the hunt to raise, with much of its previous fundraising still in the bank.

The company's all-in-one HR platform, which covers human resources, recruiting and payroll, is priced on a per-employee basis, making it possible for small companies to avoid up-front costs and to pay as they grow.

Revenues doubled last year and Personio now serves 3,000 companies. In addition to its core German-speaking markets, the company has expanded into Spain, Britain, the Nordic region, and Benelux and will enter France and Italy this year.

In an interview, Hanno Renner, the co-founder, and CEO of Personio said that the startup would be using the funding to continue building out the product — which operates a little like Workday, but built for much smaller organizations — as well as expanding its presence in Europe.

Although SMEs can be a notoriously challenging customer segment, Renner said that a new opportunity has emerged: A new wave of people in the SME sector have started to realize the value of having a modern and integrated HR platform.

Personio is not the only startup hopeful that the shift in how we work will bring a new appreciation (and appetite) for purchasing HR tools. Others like Hibob have also seen a big boost in their business and have also been raising money to tap into the opportunity more aggressively. Hibob is looking to build in more training tools, underscoring the feature race that Personio will also have to run to keep up.

But given the sheer numbers of SMBs in the European market — more than 25 MN, and accounting for more than 99% of all enterprises, according to research from the European Union — the fact that many of them have yet to adopt any kind of HR platform at all, there remains a lot of growth for a number of players.

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Topics: Funding & Investment, HR Technology

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