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Personio Executive Board members | Image credit: Personio

Bayern, Germany-based Personio, a HR management and recruiting platform developer for SMEs and startups, announced on Wednesday that it has raised $200M (approximately €190.43M) in a Series E extension round. 

The second round brings Personio’s total capital raised through Series E to $470M, leading to a valuation of $8.5B. Personio had raised its Series E funding in October, 2021, at a valuation of $6.3B.

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The Investor

The extension round was led by existing investor Greenoaks Capital Partners. The US-based firm was founded in 2012 and makes long-term, concentrated investments in technology-enabled businesses globally. 

Neil Mehta, Founder and Managing Partner of Greenoaks Capital, says, “Personio’s product has become an indispensable tool for Europe’s small and medium-sized businesses as they’ve bounced back from the challenges of the pandemic. As SMEs face the possibility of economic uncertainty ahead, Personio is a more critical platform than ever, helping customers make their HR and payroll processes more efficient and resilient while delighting employees and employers alike.”

Some of Greenoaks investments include Clover Health, Robinhood, and Katerra in the US, Coupang in South Korea, Deliveroo in the UK, and Flipkart and Oyo Rooms in India.

An all-in-one HR Solution made for SMEs

Personio was founded in 2015 by Hanno Renner, Roman Schumacher, Arseniy Vershinin, and Ignaz Forstmeier, and later joined by Jonas Rieke. The company offers cloud-based HR management and recruiting solutions and software for startups and small and medium-sized enterprises.

The platform enables its customers to store and manage all employee data and HR processes in one place, including vacation and sick days, approvals, salary, attendance, employee documents, performance, reporting, and employee onboarding.

The company states that over 6,000 companies with more than 500,000 employees have automated their people processes with Personio.

Currently, Personio has offices in Madrid, London, Dublin, and Amsterdam.

Fund utilisation

Personio says that the proceeds will “turbocharge” the development of its software, People Workflow Automation. It will also help serve its customers, acquire new ones, and build a product that optimises every stage of the employee life cycle.

Personio’s CEO and co-founder, Hanno Renner, says, “Our customers are the reason we exist and creating value for them is our first priority. We decided to raise the additional capital because we saw so many more ways to invest in our product that will increase the value we can provide.”

“Those expansions will all be embedded into People Workflow Automation, which allows customers to automate workflows based on events in the employee life cycle, from promotions and location changes to holiday requests,” adds Renner.

The company mentions in a blog that its customers can use over 100 connected applications and APIs, new process automation features, and monitoring tools. As a result, the amount of administrative work involved in things like recruiting, data analysis, and time monitoring will decrease. 

Together, these features will enhance operations across the employee life cycle and allow HR teams to focus on more strategic activities, lowering costs and helping to create efficient businesses.

Recent developments

In May, 2022, Personio announced at its H.U.G Digital event that it has acquired Back, a Berlin-based employee experience solution that automates key people processes to boost efficiency.

As part of Personio, Back’s team now brings experience in developing workflows across multiple fragmented systems, along with a mastery of ticketing and knowledge management service to boost the efficiency of HR teams.

In April, 2022, the HR tech company announced the addition of its 100th software integration to the Personio Marketplace. With such integrations, manual and fragmented HR processes can be automated and streamlined through Personio’s Marketplace.

For example, Personio’s integration with messaging app Slack ensures that an employee can save time and request an absence like a holiday request directly within Slack, boosting the employee experience. Once the absence is approved in Personio, the Slack status of that person will change automatically, making the wider team aware.