Personio raises $200M in second Series E to drive expansion and further its vision for HR software

Personio, Europe’s leading HR software company for small and mid-sized businesses, today announced a planned second closing of its pre-emptive Series E round, adding $200 million to the initial financing raised in October 2021. The new funding brings the total capital raised through its Series E to $470 million, valuing the company at $8.5 billion, making it one of the fastest growing and most valuable software startups worldwide.

Existing investor Greenoaks led the round, demonstrating further support of Personio’s ambition to digitise people processes for small and mid-sized businesses across Europe. The investment follows Personio’s exceptional recent performance, including sustained year on year growth, additional expansion opportunities, and recognises the value of Personio’s services to SMEs even in uncertain economic times.

The funds will turbocharge the development of People Workflow Automation, Personio’s vision to automate people processes across an organisation’s multiple departments and tools. Significant progress has been made to further develop an HR system that continues to provide business enhancing efficiencies today while being engineered for the future. So far a billion data updates have been automated across Personio’s customer base already, replacing time consuming manual tasks for customers.

Most recently Personio announced the acquisition of Back, an employee experience solution that automates key people processes. Back’s team brings significant experience in developing workflows that span fragmented systems, along with a specific ticketing and knowledge management service that boosts efficiency for HR teams.

Customers can now use over 100 integrated apps and APIs as well as new workflow automation and monitoring capabilities developed by Personio to reduce manual effort in tasks such as hiring, data analysis and time tracking. Together these improve operations across the employee lifecycle and allow HR teams to focus on more strategic tasks, reducing costs and helping to create efficient businesses.

Neil Mehta, Founder and Managing Partner of Greenoaks Capital: “Personio’s product has become an indispensable tool for Europe’s small and medium-sized businesses as they’ve bounced back from the challenges of the pandemic. As SMEs face the possibility of economic uncertainty ahead, Personio is a more critical platform than ever, helping customers make their HR and payroll processes more efficient and resilient while delighting employees and employers alike. We believe Personio is among the best SaaS companies in the world, with rapid growth, a sustainable business model, and exceptional leadership. We are thrilled to once again partner with Hanno and his team, and look forward to continuing our journey for many years to come.”

Hanno Renner, Co-Founder and CEO of Personio: “Our customers are the reason we exist and creating value for them is our first priority. We decided to raise the additional capital because we saw so many more ways to invest in our product that will increase the value we can provide. Those expansions will all be embedded into People Workflow Automation, which allows customers to automate workflows based on events in the employee lifecycle, from promotions and location changes to holiday requests. By continuing to focus on this strategy we expect to continue our strong growth trajectory and accelerate into 2022 and 2023, while providing customers with a great service that enhances the efficiency of their businesses.”

Over 6,000 companies with more than 500,000 employees have automated their people processes with Personio. Businesses from a wide variety of sectors use Personio, including tech companies such as Spendesk and ABOUT YOU, established mid-market players like Engel & Völkers as well as NGOs and public sector organisations such as Viva Con Agua and the Diana Award. While Personio is able to serve customers with 10 to 2,000 employees, it sees the biggest growth coming from companies between 200 to 2,000 employees which value the system’s configurability and feature depth.

Personio continues to grow its core people operating system to cover additional aspects of the employee lifecycle. Early in 2022, Personio launched its new Performance & Development solution, which empowers organisations to better develop their people, reward them fairly, and maximise overall performance. In May, the company also announced the opening of new offices in Berlin and Barcelona.

About Personio:

Personio is the People Operating System for small and medium-sized companies with 10 to 2,000 employees. Based in Munich, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona, London, Dublin and Amsterdam, Personio’s mission is to make HR processes as transparent and efficient as possible so HR can focus on what matters most: people. Personio does that by offering an all-in-one HR software that includes human resources management, recruiting and payroll, enabling HR to go beyond HR. Thanks to People Workflow Automation technology Personio helps more than 6,000 customers across Europe to remove delays and realise opportunities.

In June 2022, Personio raised an additional $200m through the second closing of its Series E funding round, at a valuation of $8.5bn.