Orgnostic — empowering fast-growing companies with people analytics
We at Earlybird Digital East are excited to announce that we have led the $5m Series Seed round of Orgnostic, a people analytics platform.
Orgnostic enables management teams and CHROs to make data-driven people decisions on various HR themes such as talent acquisition, employee retention, performance management, culture, and diversity. By integrating with an organization’s existing HR (core HRIS, ATS) and non-HR (finance, sales, marketing) software, it gathers employee data scattered across multiple systems to create a holistic view of organizational health and provides powerful analytics and reporting tools to run analyses on top of these consolidated datasets
Over the past decades, HR has been a latecomer to the digital transformation wave. Due to a combination of various factors, HR processes have remained archaic for a long time, and even today, there is little actual rigor behind most HR decisions.
However, the awareness about data-driven approaches in HR has been significantly increasing in the last couple of years. As HR teams are becoming increasingly more analytical, we observe that the demand for people analytics tools from C-levels, HR leaders as well as data analysts is continuously growing.
Luka Babic, the co-founder and CEO of Orgnostic, was long aware of this problem and emerging people analytics trends from first-hand experience. After specializing in organizational psychology during his college studies at Harvard, Luka joined Infobip (a Croatian unicorn) where he led the HR team while the company scaled from 250 to 1,500 employees. He then joined forces with his co-founder and CTO Igor Bogicevic who also struggled with similar high-growth company HR problems during his tenure at Seven Bridges Genomics, a high-profile Serbian tech company where he was the co-founder and CTO. They recognized that, with leadership and HR teams increasingly challenged in navigating through company transformation cycles, retaining top-performing employees, and keeping them engaged, there was a need to start measuring and managing their human capital with the same rigor as their financial results.
HR has been a laggard in tech adoption — but things are changing
For a long time, HR has been perceived primarily as an administrative function. Traditionally seen as a cost center instead of a growth lever, HR did not get much attention and budget from the management compared to other departments. Until recently, there was no/very little awareness of data-driven HR processes, and very few HR people had the technical experience & data skills to build these processes from scratch or use the limited number of available solutions in the market. Consequently, HR has been something of a laggard when it comes to the adoption of technology and data-driven analytics in particular.
Today, though, especially among the new generation of startups and enterprises, HR is seen as a critical function and a key lever for growth. Especially in recent years, HR budgets have grown, investments in HR tech have increased, and this once-lagging function has become increasingly sophisticated. Now we see HR teams consisting of units specializing in specific areas such as talent acquisition, performance management, learning, and development, each of which now has its own set of dedicated tools and processes. Specialized HR software with smart features and modern user interfaces have started to emerge and gain significant market share (e.g. HRIS, ATS, employee engagement). As the number of HR software increases inside the organizations, the volume of employee data also grows and all that data becomes dispersed across multiple systems. Plus, the rapid digitization of non-HR functions such as finance, sales, marketing creates a significant volume of people data stored in detached silos.
In parallel to the transformation in the HR tech stack, HR departments have also started to evolve into more analytical and technical teams to tap into the potential insights that could be obtained from the vast amount of data. Where HR professionals traditionally came from social sciences backgrounds, nowadays, new HR recruits are expected to have some technical skills such as programming and data science.
Given these strong trends in the market, we believe there is now a huge opportunity for people analytics platforms that pool and correlate all the data scattered across multiple systems & databases, create a holistic view, and empower organizations with analyses and reports to make informed HR decisions.
People analytics and current challenges
Yet, there are still a few outstanding problems that need to be addressed in people analytics before we see a wide market adoption, and we believe Orgnostic could be a key solution in this respect.
The first problem, and probably the most difficult to solve from a technical point of view, is the collection and normalization of data. People data is typically stored in various, independent, HR, or non-HR systems. There is also a huge discrepancy between these systems in terms of data format, scope, and quality. People analytics platforms should be able to integrate seamlessly with the existing software stack to consolidate relevant data, and offer a unified data model and a holistic view of organizational health.
The second problem is that the extent and quality of people data within an organization are typically far from ideal. To provide valuable insights continuously, analytics solutions should help organizations maintain their systems on an ongoing basis so that the data is clean, complete, and consistent.
And third, even though HR teams are becoming increasingly more analytical, they still need an easy-to-setup and use HR-focused analytics tool. Generalist data analytics solutions in the market are too horizontal and complex for HR people to use, and require significant development and customization effort from the end-users
Orgnostic: people analytics for fast-growing companies
Recognizing the challenges and opportunities in the people analytics space, Orgnostic’s mission is to make powerful people analytics accessible to not only large enterprises but also fast-growing scaleups and startups. The few people analytics solutions available in the market are too complex and require high services and consulting involvement. Yet, people analytics remains inaccessible for SMEs and midmarket businesses, which is a much larger segment of the market.
Orgnostic consolidates people data coming from HR and non-HR software with one-click API integrations. It ensures the standardization and quality of employee data within companies, and augments existing data sets with the results from automated employee surveys based on frameworks widely accepted in organizational psychology.
Orgnostic’s target audience is fast-growing companies with 50–700 employees, which would benefit the most from its people analytics solution given their rapid team growth, and human capital restraints in HR departments. It aims to get into a company’s HR software stack early on and scale with the customer along the way. Ensuring their data is structured from the start, by the time a company reaches 2,000+ employees, it would already have clear historical patterns of its talent acquisition, retention, team effectiveness, and succession plans that can be used for informed, data-driven people decisions. Furthermore, Orgnostic offers an easy-to-implement and use solution that matches the agility and scalability requirements of its target customer base.
Data-driven decision-making is fundamental to all business operations today. We believe that, by consolidating qualitative and quantitative employee data gathered from disparate sources, and enabling its analysis for meaningful and actionable insights, Orgnostic has the potential to become a critical part of the HR software stack. That’s what makes us so excited to support Luka, Igor, and the rest of the team in establishing Orgnostic as a category leader in the emerging people analytics space.
Learn more on Orgnostic or follow them on Twitter
Written by Mehmet Atici, Baturay Kaya and Can Gemici
