$60M Series C: The future of making work better

At Humu, our mission is to make work better. We’re excited to share that we’ve hit an exciting milestone towards achieving that goal: we recently closed a $60m Series C to accelerate our product development and hiring efforts.

The round was led by TCV, one of the world’s leading growth equity firms, with investors from Humu’s previous funding rounds including Index Ventures, IVP, and SVB Capital and new investors Global Founders Capital and Blue Ivy Ventures. As part of our new partnership with TCV, we’re also honored to announce that partner Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, will join Humu’s Board of Directors. 

“Humu’s ability to provide individualized support to employees and managers that can scale across an entire organization is truly unique. Employees who are actively engaged with Humu have shown to be significantly less likely to leave their jobs.” - Jessica Neal, Partner at TCV and Humu Board Member 

“As a firm that focuses on long-term value creation, TCV believes that Humu with its deep background in people analytics, has the potential to make a positive, and large, impact on the way we all work.” - David Eichler, Partner at TCV

When we founded Humu in 2017, we set out to make work better by making people better at work. Our core belief is that we should all be able to find meaning, support, and growth opportunities at work. By combining our collective people science and technology expertise, we built a software platform that could pinpoint the specific habits that would create healthy and productive team dynamics, and nudge people to develop those exact habits. Over time, we’ve iterated on our initial product to build the best technology for supporting managers and employees across industries and countries. We've proven that it's possible for anyone, anywhere to create a culture in which each employee feels valued, heard, and empowered to succeed when they have the right technology. 

We’re excited by what our Series C means for our customers (current and future) and our ability to make work better. And we can’t wait to keep learning and bring new products, especially for managers, to the market in the months to come.

Our journey to-date

Since Humu was founded in 2017, we’ve: 

• Helped customers like Expedia Group, Kickstarter, and sweetgreen to deliver timely, personalized, and relevant coaching so that managers and employees can do their best work every day. 
• Sent nudges in 20+ languages to 40k+ teams in 50+ countries, making it easy for them to build better habits and drive outcomes like improving managers, increasing agility, and building more inclusive cultures. And in the past two years alone, we’ve seen 10x growth in the number of people getting nudges.
• Had 95% of people who get nudges tell us that Humu drives noticeable positive change within their organization.
• Saved departments millions of dollars in reduced turnover costs, increased customer satisfaction scores, and dramatically boosted team productivity.
• Unburdened managers and proven that nudges are more effective than training at driving lasting, meaningful, and measurable improvements.
  

The future

During the pandemic, we’ve helped companies navigate continued uncertainty and transform how (and where) work happens. The biggest trend we’ve seen emerge over the past two years is that managers and employees need more personalized, targeted support than ever.  

Managers in particular play an increasingly important role in shaping teams’ and employees’ attitudes towards work. Managers have always been critical to team performance and wellbeing (see Laszlo’s pioneering work at Google on what became known as Project Oxygen), but the shift to hybrid has made their impact even greater. According to our first ever State of the Manager report, teams are 80% more likely to make improvements when they see their manager taking action. And during the pandemic, employees with a manager who offered them personalized support and development opportunities were 7.9x more likely to stay at their jobs. 

But while managers’ responsibilities have shifted and expanded, the ways in which they are supported by their organizations have not. In the past year alone, we’ve seen managers struggle more than ever to balance team workloads, boost performance, and combat burnout. 

Against this backdrop, we–a team of 90 people–are making it a priority to enable managers and employees to engage more quickly, honestly, and constructively, so that they can make work better for themselves and their teams. Our nudge technology will evolve to automate routine tasks, empower managers to better navigate complex people challenges, and make it easier to always manage according to best (and science-based) practices. 

With our latest round of funding, we’ll continue to expand Humu to provide world-class manager support, in addition to our current role of supporting HR leaders. That includes hiring people who are passionate about making work better. We’re gearing up for a year of expansive growth, are hiring for many roles, and are committed to preserving the inclusive and supportive culture we’ve created. We aspire to set an example for what work can be: meaningful, inclusive, and fun.

Thank you for joining us on this journey. We’re excited to accelerate our efforts to develop new and innovative ways to make it easy for managers and their teams to improve, every single week. If you’d like to learn more about how we can do exactly that for your managers, please visit humu.com/web-demo