Kenjo, an HR automation software, today announced on their blog that they have successfully raised €1.7m in seed funding led by two individuals – Julian Teicke, CEO, wefox Group and investor along with Maximilian Tayenthal, co-founder and chief financial officer, N26.
Although there’s been no indication of what the funding will be specifically used for, it’s likely the company will be planning further growth across more countries and industries.
Berlin-based Kenjo offers a suite of tools through its service to enable companies to automate HR admin tasks such as HR emails, viewing candidates’ profiles, creating internal documents customised for each team member, or calculating team members’ annual leave.
Kenjo was founded in 2019 by a group of individuals “who are passionate about HR and its potential to bring about positive change in the workplace” and have achieved significant growth with a second office in Madrid.
Kenjo says their platform has improved focus on employees rather than the traditional HR software providers that struggle to account for the increased change in team turnover businesses are witnessing today and the flexibility companies offer their team as “work is no longer 9 to 5”.
David Padilla, CEO, Kenjo said in a statement: “We know that there is an emerging generation of workers who will want to work flexibly and this is going to be the new standard for the future of business. We noticed early on that if companies did not prepare for the change in employee work patterns they would suffer.”
Julian Teicke gave reasoning for the investment in a statement: “We are witnessing unprecedented change across the globe as businesses and society are severely impacted by the spread of Covid19, which many organisations were simply not prepared for. “As a consequence, we saw a huge risk facing SMEs who account for 90% of global business yet do not necessarily have the right tools in place to cope with this new situation.”
Kenjo is not the only business to have successfully raised funds during the COVID-19 era with other automation platforms including Templafy successfully raising $25m and Smarterly securing £7m in a Series A funding round.
COVID-19 has made businesses quickly adopt a new style of working with everyone being asked to work from home where possible putting strain on departments such as HR and recruitment where interviews or appraisals would have been done in person.
Kenjo’s platform allows for HR teams to have documents prepared and shared with people across the business taking out manual processing time such as emailing each person or department individually and gaining quicker responses.
These responses can then be tracked and saved in the platform to be used by the analytical capabilities to display results in dashboard-style and aggregate responses in a cleaner fashion to present to heads of departments for example.
Padilla explained that COVID-19 has changed the way of working and why Kenjo was built with the future of working in mind: “We built Kenjo for the future of working, which is for teams to work remotely but remain constantly connected to their organizations and, more importantly, hands-on control over their personal and professional development no matter where they are in the world. However, COVID-19 has ushered in this new way of working a lot faster than we anticipated”.
Teicke explained they knew the way of working would change making Kenjo a sound business before COVID-19 had broken out: “Even before corona struck, we already knew that the future of business would change as more people prefer to work remotely and with the new generations growing up with technology at their fingertips it seemed only logical that this evolution was taking place, however coronavirus has forced this change almost overnight,”
