Can this startup solve the staffing headache of digital nomads? It just raised $12 million for a trial • TechCrunch
In the new era of teleworking and hybrid, companies need to manage people who move to join or work remotely. For obvious reasons, that created a huge headache for HR executives.
Back in 2014, FlatClub already has an apartment rental platform. But a chance meeting encouraged them to pivot in 2017 to become Benivo, a B2B SaaS HR platform solution for mobile or on-the-go workforce. They then used the capital and revenue from the consumer business to scale up the new company.
The result was a $12 million growth funding round led by Updata Partners, a Growth Equity Fund, bringing the total investment in the company to $30 million. Not bad for a startup that started with apartments.
Playing in a space similar to Benivo is Topia, formerly MoveGuides which burned about $140 million. Benivo has now managed to secure customers including Google, Mondelez, General Electric, Phillips 66, Unity, Wayfair, CGI, Bloomberg and around 50 others.
The so-called ‘global mobility’ market is sizable but many processes are still manual and often require their employees or companies to use several platforms.
Benivo’s goal is that it uses AI for automation and predictive analytics to help the underdogs in HR who need to dispatch employees around or track where they’re going.
Founder Nitzan Yudan tells me the journey begins in the Silicon Roundabout TechHub . initial startup co-working spacewhen a chance meeting with the Google HR team led to the idea of turning around this new direction.
“Despite presenting Google with the ugliest page in the history of internet sites (which was not yet our MVP product), they still cared about their employees and really wanted to solve a problem. So they went ahead with us. With Google as our first customer, the decision to move away from the consumer business and stop competing with Airbnb was a natural move for the company,” he said by email.
Benivo says it competes at various levels with ‘Mission Management Systems like Equus, Topia, KPMG and ‘Rotation Management Companies’ like SIRVA, WIchert, Cartus, BGRS, AIRES, Altair), but solve both problems with a single platform.
The company will use the new funding to grow its team in the US, UK, Armenia and India.
