Aeqium: The Total Compensation Platform that’s Totally Worth it
Bye-bye, spreadsheets. Hello, automated compensation management.
By Akriti Dokania, Partner at Ridge Ventures
This just in: people work for money. Sure, the ping pong table and kombucha on tap are nice and all, but if employees aren’t paid fairly, they’ll promptly cash out their PTO days and find a company that takes compensation seriously.
Don’t forget about the poor souls tasked with paying these employees: mid-level managers. They’re so overworked and technologically underequipped that paying employees in a just and prompt manner is a serious chore. And backfilling ex-employees? That’s a nightmare of its own.
One solution that is paying attention to this trend is Aeqium. The total compensation tool announced a seed round, backed by Ridge (woohoo!) and Vestigo Ventures, to propel its mission to simplify total compensation management for employees, managers, executives, and people teams.
Here is how Aeqium empowers companies to make cents-ible, data-driven compensation decisions, and enables leaders to do what they do best — lead!
It’s (comp)licated
Per a recent study by the Society of Human Resource Management, subpar compensation is the number one reason employees are jumping ship. In many of these cases, outdated approaches to compensation management are to blame. The culprit, as with many other verticals, is spreadsheets. Information that could have contributed to fairer compensation, and aided retention efforts, is lost in an endless sea of rows and columns and white rectangles.
The aftermath isn’t pretty: managers struggle to make and communicate compensation decisions; employees bail; and people teams are left in Excel hell.
For managers, in particular, compensation management is one of several tasks negatively impacted by an oversized daily workload. Recurring manager syncs. One-on-ones with cross-functional peers. Participating on interview panels across departments. Superfluous meetings flood so many managerial calendars that actual work is often pushed back to the end of the day. This includes filling out spreadsheets in conjunction with HR and finance, and working on performance and compensation reviews.
If organizations don’t prioritize compensation management, retention, company reputation, hiring, and morale can take a nosedive. But how can managers — the ones assigned to handle this compensation crisis — save the day when they don’t have the time, data, nor the tools and coordination required to pay employees what they deserve?
Aeqium has entered the chat
With Aeqium on their utility belts, managers and HR teams can finally reap the benefits of automated, data-driven compensation management. That means more time for human resources to be humane and resourceful, and more time for managers to manage, strategize, and motivate their teams.
Aeqium’s all-in-one total compensation solution puts the “comp” in comprehensive. It includes:
Compensation Cycles. Aeqium fully automates compensation cycles. Comp planning decisions are thoroughly collaborative and privacy-protected without emailing around massive spreadsheets. Obtaining and analyzing total headcount expense, salary budget, promotions, and other pertinent data is a cinch.
Total Rewards Analysis. Leaders can track their team’s compensation, glean actionable insights, and analyze pay equity. Companies can get proactive about potential comp issues without needing to crunch the numbers manually. Employees can make sense of what they’re actually taking home.
Compensation Bands. Aeqium enables collaborating on compensation bands without the copy/paste that typically goes into getting recruiters and managers the info they need. Past offer data and existing employees are shown in the bands to help companies figure out what’s working and what needs to change.
Aeqium’s troika of tools is more than enough to turbocharge a company’s total compensation operations. This doesn’t factor in the Interactive Offer Letter tool either, which is currently free to use.
The compensational dream team
A solution of this caliber requires experienced, industry-tested hands. The compensational savants behind Aeqium possess domain expertise that few founders can match.
Before starting Aeqium, co-founder and CEO Peter McKee served as an Engineering Manager at Uber, where he founded and oversaw the team in charge of self-driving features. Prior to that, Peter managed the team handling Uber’s external API and partnerships. His first Engineering Manager gig was at none other than Braze — an early Ridge investment that IPO’d in late 2021.
Co-founder Dwijen Patel brings his own share of managerial experience, joining Aeqium’s leadership team after managing engineering at Walmart’s Intelligent Retail Lab. Dwijen held the same role at Jet, rounding out a resume that also includes engineering positions at Palantir and Bloomberg LP. A third co-founder, Jared Katz, boasts a unique blend of engineering (Jet) and investment experience (Floating Point Group, Block Street Capital).
Peter and Dwijen know all too well the compensation bottlenecks that plague managers, employees, and HR. With this founding team at the helm, Aeqium is in prime position to establish itself as the de facto total compensation platform, and take the sweat and stress out of compensation cycles.
Changing the compensation conversation
Compensation cycles are the most hated but most critical step to company growth. The groans of functional leaders are real, and the work behind gathering appropriate information on pay, equity, and employee morale is painful for HR. Salaries, the biggest PnL item for CFOs, are also a pain to plan for. If companies want to ace compensation management, retain employees, and unlock the next phase of growth, Aeqium is their ticket.
Congrats to Peter, Dwijen, Jared, and everyone at Aeqium on today’s funding! Ridge is immensely proud to support a company that’s untangling the compensation cobwebs and fixing a major painpoint for businesses and their hardworking teams.
Want to join the total compensation revolution? Check out Aeqium’s open positions here.
