HR startup HiBob’s valuation surges 50% to $2.45B on a $150M raise – TechCrunch

Cloud-based human resource (HR) platform HiBob today announced that it had raised $150 million in a series D round of funding at a $2.45 billion valuation.

This represents a nearly 50% increase compared to its series C valuation round just 10 months ago, when it also raised $150 million. But perhaps more interestingly, HiBob seems to have bucked a broader trend that has seen startups’ and scaleups’ valuations plummet in a sea of corrections and down-rounds — in the past month, Sweden’s buy-now-pay-later fintech Klarna saw its valuation drop 85% to $6.7 billion in the space of a year, while payments giant Stripe has apparently seen its own internal valuation fall 28% to $74 billion.

Bullish

Founded out of Israel in 2015, HiBob’s platform — which it calls Bob — gives HR teams many of the tools they need to manage their workforce, including automating onboarding workflows for new-hires, managing timesheets and time-off approvals, conducting surveys, and more.

It’s worth noting that one of HiBob’s rivals in the space, Personio, recently raised $200 million at a $8.5 billion valuation — a 35% increase on the past year. So it’s clear that investors are pretty bullish about HR tech, particularly at a time when businesses are navigating a new world where remote- and hybrid-working has increasingly become the norm, and competition for talent has reached fever pitch.

Indeed, HiBob said it has just come off the back of its sixth year in a row of “triple-digit revenue growth,” while its internal headcount has doubled with more than 370 new-hires in the past year.

“The competition for talent remains intense even in the midst of increasing market uncertainty,” HiBob CEO and cofounder Ronni Zehavi said in a press release. “Modern businesses that value their talent know that HRIS (human resource information systems) is not simply about headcount growth, but rather about effective and proactive people management during periods of expansion and contraction.”

HiBob’s seres D round was led by General Atlantic, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners among others. The company has now raised around $425 million since its inception.