Australia HR start-up Flare raises $16m

Point72 Ventures, Acorn Capital, also participated, as did Malcolm Turnbull, a former Australian prime minister who has taken up an advisory role with KKR and will join Flare as an advisor. It brings total funding to date to more than $50 million, including a $15 million round last year that included Reinventure Group and Tank Stream Ventures.

Founded in 2015, Flare positions itself as the only free workplace services provider designed for Australian businesses. Its core offering is a cloud-based HR and employee benefits platform that helps inform staff about financial services and streamline a number of processes around payroll management and onboarding new talent.

The technology is said to be integrated into more than 10 HR and payroll platforms across Australia. Flare claims its products were used by more than 2,500 businesses with some 650,000 employees in 2020 alone. This exposure equates to one in 20 people in the Australian workforce.

Recent uptake has been tied to the effects of COVID-19, including greater reliance on distributed and remote workforces, which may be experiencing greater stress. “Flare’s unique business model provides real value to Australian firms and their employees in equal measure, at a time when the future of work looks very different,” Turnbull said in a statement.

A key aspect of the latest investment is an operational partnership with MYOB, which will make Flare software available to its small to medium-sized enterprise clients by the end of the year. This will be extended to MYOB’s larger enterprise clients in 2021. It comes less than a month after MYOB acquired Brisbane-based workforce management platform Roubler, agreeing to a similar arrangement.

“Our purpose at MYOB is to help more business owners in Australia and New Zealand start, survive and succeed, and what better way to do this than by empowering them to more efficiently onboard and engage the lifeblood of their business – their employees,” Andrew Baines, MYOB’s general manager for financial services, added.

KKR completed a A$2 billion buyout of MYOB last year. Bain Capital bought the company in 2011 for around A$1.3 billion and made several partial exits before and after the company went public at a valuation of A$2.6 billion in 2015.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Australasia
• Support services
• Expansion
• Technology
• Australia
• KKR
• professional services
• Financial Services
• enterprise software