Israeli human resources management platform company Hibob today announced that it had raised $20 million from the company's existing investors: Bessemer Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, and Fidelity's Eight Road Ventures, plus a new investor: Japanese corporate investment fund Sumitomo. The current round is Hibob's A+ round - a continuation of its A round that brings the total raised by Hibob to $45 million. An A+ round means that the existing investors are getting an opportunity to increase their holdings in the company on the same terms set for their earlier investment, but at a higher company value.
Hibob's platform provides management with 50-2,000 employees,with insights and tools for a dynamic work environment. The company says that according to global figures, the mix of employees is undergoing dramatic change. By 2025, 70% of employees will be millennials or from the Z generation bringing different outlooks, behavior, connections, and values to the labor market that did not previously exist, such as identification with a team, rather than the entire company, a need for transparency, and increased importance of leisure. Among other things, Hibob's platform enables team members to give feedback to each other and enables team managers to spot the connection between the employees' performance in a company and their fields of interest. The underlying idea is to provide employee management tools that will impart a feeling of transparency and decentralization, with the power lying with the team managers, in contrast to management tools for large organizations, which have centralized management of employees through the human resources departments and senior management.
Hibob was founded in 2015, and began its activity in the UK market two years ago. The company currently serves 450 customers in the UK, the US, and Israel, including 15% of all the growing high-tech companies in Israel, says Hibob cofounder and CEO Ronni Zehavi. Customers include ironSource, Fiverr, Clicktale, Tufin, Etoro, Playbuzz, Monzo, and Revolut. Hibob does not disclose revenue, but Zehavi says that revenue grew 460% in 2018, compared with 2017.
The company has 130 employees, including 75 development and support employees in Israel. Zehavi says that the company will use the money from the current investment to hire 20 more employees in Israel and 20 more overseas. He says that Hibob operates in a growing market, and that the new financing round, which is relatively large for companies in the sector, will enable it to become a market leader. "There are 50 million employees in 600,000 growing companies in the US alone. Most of these companies work with platforms that perform one task, such as monitoring hours, or with Excel spreadsheets, not with a holistic platform like ours," he says.
Hibob
Founded: 2015
Founders: Ronni Zehavi (CEO), Amit Knaani (director of product management), Israel David (CTO), and Andy Bellass (VP solutions)
Employees: 130, including 75 in Israel
Offices: Tel Aviv, New York, London
Capital raised: $45 million
Prominent investors: Venture capital funds Bessemer Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, and Fidelity's Eight Road Ventures, plus Japanese corporate investment fund Sumitomo
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on March 13, 2019
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