Deal focus: Deputy punches the new timeclock

Digital natives in increasingly wired industries toggle back and forth between private lives and work lives with a fluidity that older generations can’t match. But for now, their employers have few tools to let them maximize the efficiency advantages of this increasingly ubiquitous but underexploited skillset.

Existing systems for managing teams of employees, even in some high-tech companies, are positively antique compared to most other aspects of a modern business. In many cases, they still involve paper timeclocks, whiteboards, and spreadsheets. At the same time, businesses are engaging increasingly mobile and geographically disparate workforces that follow fluctuating schedules with more hourly-based duties. 

This divergence goes some way to explaining the enthusiasm behind the latest funding round for Sydney-based workforce management software provider Deputy. The start-up raised $81 million this week from Square Peg Capital, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Equity Venture Partners, and OpenView. It is said to be the largest ever Series B raised in Australia and brings the company’s total funding to date to $106 million.

“We spoke to many happy customers who were crying tears of joy at the benefits of Deputy,” says Eric Liaw, a general partner at IVP, who will join Deputy’s board. “Hourly workers were similarly thrilled, they have more flexibility to work as many or as few shifts as they like, with more predictability. Business managers love the improved visibility and reliability, they now cannot imagine going back to the dark ages and operating their business without Deputy’s suite of tools.’”

Ashik Ahmed and Steve Shelley founded Deputy in 2008 by developing software to handle employee time tracking and scheduling at their previous start-up, flight services provider Aero-Care. The company now claims to have serviced some 90,000 businesses, including McDonalds, Amazon, Uber, and Nike, as well as US space agency NASA.

To date, it has scheduled some 200 million shifts, equating to more than 1.2 billion hours of work, and facilitated around $30 billion in payroll payments. Other core products, offered on a software-as-a-service basis, include management tools for simplifying scheduling, timesheets, and workforce communication. The idea is to optimize staff schedules by role, hours worked, and other criteria, thereby helping businesses streamline operations and empowering employees to work the way they want.

Most of the fresh capital will be used to build out the Australian team, but the company has already established a presence in the US, the UK and the Philippines.

“There are 2.3 billion hourly-paid workers in the world today, but too many of these are still managing their jobs in archaic ways,” says Ahmed, who also serves as Deputy’s CEO. “The opportunity here is huge. We envisage a day where every single shift being worked is powered by Deputy – and this funding allows us to build the best product and engineering team in the world that helps us get there.”

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