Australia's Employment Hero raises Series F at $1.3b valuation

Existing investors AirTree Ventures, OneVentures, Insight Partners, and Seek also took part in the round, according to Techcrunch. The company has received around USD 270m in private funding since its founding in 2014, with its valuation rising more than fivefold over the past two-and-a-half years.

Employment Hero was worth USD 250m when recruitment portal Seek led a USD 35m Series D in March 2021, supported by OneVentures, AirTree, and Salesforce Ventures. Four months later, the company raised a USD 140m Series E at a valuation of USD 800m. Insight Partners led that round, while AirTree, OneVentures, Salesforce, and Seek re-upped.

The Series D and E rounds coincided with a surge in funding for workforce management software companies in Australia and New Zealand. Go1 and SafetyCulture hit valuations of USD 1bn and USD 1.7bn, respectively, around he same time. Culture Amp also received substantial VC backing, while private equity-owned Ascender was sold to a US trade buyer for USD 500m.

Employment Hero – a cloud-based provider of end-to-end HR services, from recruitment and onboarding to payroll and performance assessment – said in a statement that it would use the new capital to support global expansion. The company has more than 300,000 business customers in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Singapore, and Malaysia. It claims over 2m active users across its platforms.

“Whilst we were not actively seeking funding, our growth story has meant that we have received significant inbound investor interest – this has given us incredible confidence in our vision and allowed us to opportunistically boost our balance sheet, even at a time when the funding environment has been tight,” said Ben Thompson, founder and CEO of Employment Hero.

“TCV is a leading technology investor with an enviable track-record backing many of the world’s most ubiquitous digital platforms like Airbnb and Spotify, so we are very excited to welcome them aboard as we do the same for employment.”

TCV explained in a separate statement that it had studied the small and medium-sized enterprise-focused HR software space globally and recognised how it has been underserved, with many companies still relying on point solutions and manual processes. Employment Hero’s functionality and its payroll offering – which is localised to meet the needs of each market – stood out.

Muz Ashraf, a general partner at TCV, noted that the company’s vision “extends far beyond the employer-facing HRIS [HR information systems] and payroll products.” Employment Hero has already launched Swag, an employee-facing app that offers access to payslips and facilitates leave applications. A jobs marketplace that integrates with existing applications, is now being rolled out.

Asked why the company continues to raise capital while others have struggled, Ashraf highlighted its discipline. “They never raised at inflated valuations and the team has always been disciplined around operational efficiency, running the business with leading SaaS [software-as-a-service] KPIs [key performance indicators]," he said.

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• Topics
• Australasia
• Technology
• Expansion
• Australia
• enterprise software
• TCV
• AirTree Ventures
• OneVentures
• Insight Partners
• Growth capital