Investing in HeyTeam or how not to play Cuban music to your deaf grandad

We are thrilled to announce our new lead investment in HeyTeam’s 10M€ Series A funding round, alongside our Spanish friends from All Iron Ventures and top HR Tech Business Angels (Moovone, Snapshift, Talent.io, IBM).

We wanted to take this opportunity to share some thoughts on HR Tech and on why we believe HeyTeam brings something new to the table.

Vertical tools are fine-tuned instruments 🎺

HR tech is hot and Covid definitely played its part in turning upside down existing HR processes and urging for new HR models.

Those are facts.

A myriad of players are now tackling most of HR main verticals: salary, management, feedback, leave, recruitment, on-project engagement and tracking… For each of these aspects, we can broadly categorize them into 2 categories:

1. The ones digitizing existing processes or taking the digital experience to the next level, mostly by taking advantage of the lack of innovation by legacy players. These players mainly focus on SMBs (more limited functional needs), providing them with better UX and more digitized workflows.
2. The ones paving the way for new HR experiences and methodologies, more adapted to the needs and demands of employees.

Both segments get their credibility from their focus, their expertise on verticalized HR components. And huge companies are emerging with this vertical approach. Congrats to them!

For HRs and Managers, it’s no longer a problem of finding perfectly tuned verticalized HR instruments. Now, the question is on how this galaxy of tools can gravitate smoothly to build the best employee experience. In other words: how to compose the best melody from these vertical instruments?

Here comes the bandmaster 🎼

Four people go to a concert: your friend from Cuba really used to listening to Caribbean music, your classical-music-lover sister, your almost-deaf grand dad and you. You obviously have different expectations, knowledge and capacities. But you still want to go to the same concert all together. How could the band provide the best musical experience to each person in your group, knowing you all have different music tastes? And how about a 300-people-crowd?

Now. Let’s transpose that to the workplace.

Depending on your location, your job and your background, you don’t have the same needs as an employee. The Spanish Sales team is not the same as the French Tech team nor the British Product team. Cherry on the cake, as an HR, you have to provide all these people the best employee experience while some of them will be partly or fully remote across geographies and switching jobs internally and externally. A true nightmare when you have 300+ employees and onboard 100+ every year, and all you have to offer is a disappointing one-size-fits-all process.

HeyTeam is that game changer.

HeyTeam enables HR Teams and Managers to create automated workflows to provide their employees with a best-in-class experience at every key moment of their journey in the company. At scale.

Having started with onboarding a few years ago, HeyTeam is now the go-to-tool for HRs to push/pull information and communication all along the employee journey : onboarding, move across the organization, parental leave, offboarding… and much more!

With 100% customizable workflows, and with connections to all HR management systems, HeyTeam helps HR teams to save time, reduce early resignation and increase hiring referrals. In a context of talent war, it’s now a must have for all of its clients.

Defining People Activation: a parallel with Marketing Automation 🎭

A decade ago, Marketing Campaign tools (Mailchimp, Hubspot…) were built on top of CRMs to master the moments of truth in the customer journey. Today, HeyTeam is built on top of HRIS to master the moments that matter in the employee journey. As simple as that.

And that’s exactly because it’s simple to grasp, easy to use and clearly addressing a strong pain point of 300+employee companies that we decided to invest in what we believe could be game changer.

HeyTeam is uniquely positioned to be the category definer of a new area that’s deemed to dramatically grow: People Activation.

You can have all the best Marketing tools, if your clients are not perfectly activated, you lose most of the value. Likewise, using all the vertical HR tools is good, activating the employees so they use them is better.

We believe that People Activation is the missing link in the HR Chain and that it will be an accelerator of HR innovation in many organizations.

For all of these reasons, and not only because every employee should hear the best sound, but also because of the fit we got with this repeat-entrepreneur founding team, we feel honored to jump on this fast-paced salsa 💃

HeyTeam, let the music start ! 🎶🎵🪕