Investing in Hublo, the human resource software for healthcare professionals
Hublo, the human resource SaaS easing the daily life of healthcare facilities and professionals, announced it has raised a €22 million series A led by Revaia with the participation of Acton Capital. We are delighted to partner with the Hublo team led by Antoine Loron, Adrien Beata, and Christopher Rydahl. This is Revaia’s 8th growth investment and its first within the healthcare industry.
Hublo’s vision is simple and crucial: change the life of the 15 million healthcare professionals in Europe who waste precious time every day with complex and outdated tools, when they need to save lives. Better managing healthcare staff on a daily basis, saving time, and improving the quality of life at work are important issues further highlighted by the Covid-19 crisis.
To their credit, the Hublo team has gained remarkable traction among an impressive pool of 2,800 client healthcare facilities in France and in Germany. Hublo has only started to scratch the surface of a massive untapped opportunity for cloud adoption, knowing that the healthcare industry represents 10% of the European Union’s €13 trillion GDP and 7% of European employed, i.e. 15 million Europeans.
Hublo builds a simple and user-friendly digital platform to help hospitals, clinics, and retirement homes find staff easily and efficiently so that they can refocus on their core mission: saving lives. The company developed a short-term staffing management tool to help hospitals save time, reduce recruitment expenses and improve employer-employee relations.
Think of an HR manager in a hospital desperately looking to fill a replacement for the next day. It’s 7 pm and she or he has no view on her or his colleague’s agenda or her or his network of temporary workers. Starts a manual and tedious job of calling potential replacement candidates one by one, such a process typically takes 2 hours on a daily basis and is mostly done with a phone, a pen, and a paper book.
Once the Hublo digital planning solution is implemented, there’s no way back to the analog pen and paper for healthcare professionals. The Hublo platform enjoys massive usage and rapid adoption. Users can log from their mobile phone or desktop, fill in their skills, and select their available slots in a few clicks. What’s more, Hublo interconnects with already-in-place ERP or payroll software to fluidify workflows and reduce administrative work.
At Revaia, we are big believers in the convergence of usage and UX between B2C (slick) digital experiences and (often cumbersome) B2B software products. We think it’s a key aspect of software adoption and that’s part of what drove our software investing in Aircall, Planity and GetAccept. Customers and users absolutely love the Hublo platform and we were stunned to hear such productivity gains achieved by Hublo’s clients when doing customer calls: 90% of healthcare facilities managed to reduce their recruitment costs when 94% of users believe they are saving time with Hublo.
With this fundraising, the company is set to successfully continue a bold geographic expansion and plans to open 4 new additional countries with a presence in France and Germany already. Hublo has a pragmatic and deep product approach unrolling a vertical software suite through the overlooked healthcare talent management category. Digitalization of healthcare has been a long-standing leitmotiv for technology entrepreneurs to improve such critical infrastructure of our economies. Few European startups drove a deep enough wedge into this hard-to-navigate software category because of heavy regulation and strong customer inertia.
Hublo’s focus is on the poorly addressed human resource management category in healthcare. We saw first-hand when partnering with Welcome To The Jungle how HR could leverage technology for the better, we think the healthcare industry is no different. It’s probably because people are the main asset of the healthcare system and represent 70% of costs. It’s striking to see an absenteeism rate of over 10% in healthcare and a disengaging career choice for more and more people. Even if the light was cast on the daily heroism nurses are demonstrating during the global pandemic, long hours and low salaries have taken their tolls among the profession.
Still, the world will lack 18 million nurses by 2030, while there are 28 million nurses in activity today. Healthcare budgets have skyrocketed with the Covid-19 crisis, and call for significant digital investments. Nurses and auxiliary nurses now need to be considered as white-collars and not blue-collars anymore. Recruit, manage, retain and increase staff engagement is one of the key issues of healthcare facilities and their leaders. Digitalization and innovation in daily practices are late because the focus has always been on medical innovation. As a result, little innovation in Talent & People management has happened yet in healthcare.
Getting back to efficiency, it’s fair to say it’s Hublo’s founding team second nature. Coupling a problem-solving product for their clients with a highly efficient capital consumption and allocation is the winning strategy Antoine, Adrien and Christopher are pursuing. We are impressed by where the team went with little. The level of maturity in their stellar execution is truly unique. Few startups boast to merge with their biggest competitor to capture a market and serve their clients better: this is what the medGo and Whoog teams went through to give birth to Hublo in early 2020.
Revaia grew its conviction to invest in Hublo because the company’s mission deeply resonated with ours of revealing a better future. The company is strongly committed to advancing healthcare workers’ conditions. As a brief illustration, Hublo offered its platform pro bono by creating the initiative #Renforts-Covid during the height of the first 2020 lockdown in France. In partnership with 11 of the 13 regional branches of the Health Ministry in France, Hublo helped gather more than 60,000 volunteer professionals in 2 months, who supported 6,000 healthcare facilities in crucial need of extra-hands during this pandemic.
We could not be prouder to partner with this great team solving a critical problem of our time: instilling digital process and productivity gains in healthcare, with a focus on improving health workers’ conditions and ultimately patients’ conditions. We are honored to welcome German venture capital investor Acton Capital as a co-investor to support Hublo’s European expansion and equity story. Acton has a strong track record in supporting successful vertical SaaS such as Clio for lawyers.
Today, Hublo brings together a user community of more than 400,000 healthcare professionals, able to take 7,000 daily shifts in healthcare facilities whenever they are needed. The company currently has 75 employees in its offices in Paris, Sophia Antipolis and Cologne. The start-up plans to recruit 200 employees by 2023, in France and Germany as well opening 4 new countries, with one ambition: become the European leader in SaaS HR solutions for healthcare facilities — they are hiring here. All right guys, let’s roll!
Hadrien Comte
