Global people analytics firm Panalyt raises $3 Mn in seed funding

Global People Analytics software vendor Panalyt has successfully closed a $3 Million seed round, led by D4v and including the Chiba Dojo Fund  and Headline Asia. With the recent round of funding Panalyt is also relocating its Headquarters to Tokyo in August 2021. 

Panalyt founded in Singapore in 2017, empowers business leaders, HR and people managers across the organization to make data-driven employees decisions without relying solely on experience and intuition. It enables access to relevant, timely people data and insights across the employee lifecycle through its suite of pre-built dashboards, reports and visualizations. Recently, it also got applauded for its innovations in the space of Relational Analytics / Organizational Network Analysis. Back in 2019, Panalyt was also one of the participants of the People Matters TechHR Singapore Startup program. 

Panalyt has been recognized as a leading global People Analytics vendor by RedThread Research, as a Gartner “Cool Vendor 2021” in HCM technologies to support the Future of Work, and the HR Technology Excellence Award for People Analytics by the Japan Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.  

After customer deployments in seven countries, Panalyt has determined that Japan has the largest output gap and room for growth in terms of effectively using people data to improve organizational decision-making. 

Founder & CEO, Daniel J West shares; “Company leaders, HR professionals and line-managers alike all need to be looking at the same data around people, and have the same, instant access to essential data, trends and insights, from all of the many tools the company uses to manage their people. Companies have this common view when it comes to financial reporting; reports, forecasts and balance sheets for the business are easily understood and shared between stakeholders, and Panalyt aims to fill the same gap for People Data, as the Balance Sheet for HR."

The tools and frameworks for supporting and streamlining better-decision making based on data have already penetrated not only financial statements in the financial domain but also SFA in the sales domain and CRM in the marketing domain. In the Human Resources field, there has been an exponential increase in niche SaaS HR technology tools to improve the efficiency of various human resources operations and it will continue to rise in the new pandemic-stricken hybrid world of work. To manage a largely distrubted workforce and ensure excellent employee experience, HR leaders need to integrate and analyze data across disparate systems and spreadsheets, and leverage those insights to improve experience across the talent lifecycle.  

Japan Expansion

While there is a great demad for people analytics among Japanese firms, there is a lack of availability of solutions. As per Panalyt's research, "Not only People Analytics teams but also the Human Resources teams themselves are still scarce, and there are few successful cases that can justify the investment required for building a  people analytics infrastructure. In light of this, Japanese companies have not made much progress in the strengthening of their systems to enable effective data-driven people decisions."

The people analytics firm, hence, sees immense growth opportunities in the market and moves its headquarters to Japan. However, the transfer of its HQ to Japan does not mean a withdrawal from other markets.

Speaking on funding, investor Principal Asumi Ota, D4V (Design for Ventures) shared, "As work styles evolve, from lifetime employment to the generalization of job changes, seniority to performance-based cultures, and offline to online, changes are also required in corporate human resources management."

"I feel that the number of companies that hold data on their employees is increasing due to the rise of HR Tech, but I think it is important to manage it in a way that can easily lead to improved human resources management. D4V believes that Panalyt’s products, which are particularly about UI design and usability, will promote the effective use of personnel data and accelerate the raising of the bar for human resources management in Japan and around the world," he added. 

Chiba Dojo Fund's Representative Director General Partner Kotaro Chiba feels Panalyt’s products make full use of Daniel and Takako’s personnel experience at global companies and expects that the concept of people analytics as a “financial statement for human resources” will be introduced by various companies in the future. 

Headline Asia's Investor Hirohei Suzuki also expects Panalyt’s services will reduce bias in decision-making in the HR domain and will greatly contribute to creating an environment where employees can work together comfortably. Now that remote work is becoming more widespread, I feel that it is a system aligned with the greater needs of the organization. 

Speaking on the Japan expansion Daniel said, "For Panalyt, the importance and opportunity of the Japan market, as well as the supportive and engaged local investor base, has shown us that our focus for the next stage of our growth should be Japan, and so moving our legal Headquarters has been a natural move."

Panalyt's strategy over the next 24 months is to focus on Japan market growth, and ensuring that as it continues to develop a fully global product, it makes it useful and relevant for the unique aspects of Japan corporations and employees.