London-based HRtech startup  Humaans, has raised $5 Mn in seed funding to accelerate the development of its employee on-boarding and management platform. 

The round saw participation from Y Combinator, Mattias Ljungman’s Moonfire, Frontline Ventures, and former head of Stripe Issuing, Lachy Groom. Other investors included LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner (via Next Play Ventures), Stripe COO Claire Johnson, Figma CEO Dylan Field, Intercom co-founder Des Traynor, former Workday CTO David Clarke, former Benchmark GP Scott Belsky, Notion COO Akshay Kothari, Qubit co-founder Emre Baran, Evervault CEO Shane Curren and Stripe security engineer Gerardo Di Giacomo.

Founded by former Qubit employees Giovanni Luperti and Karolis Narkevicius, Humaans came into existence formerly in April 2020 after the duo left the product agency they had founded together. 

The startup will use the proceeds to double down on product and engineering by bringing in the best talent to help fulfill its vision, increase its reach, drive value for the wider community. 

CEO Giovanni Luperti stated, “At Humaans, we're building a new kind of employee management platform designed to help teams operate collaboratively by using the best in class point solutions they need for their staff while maintaining a central record of employee data. Our vision for Humaans is to be the central hub for all employee data, enabling new tools and services to be built on top of the Humaans infrastructure.”

Humaans now has customers with offices in 21 countries across both Europe and the US that employ people across 54 countries globally – including Korea, China, Japan, UK, Germany, Denmark, Portugal, Canada, Brazil, and more.

The funding is a validation of Humaans efforts to position itself as a central hub for employee on-boarding and management and integrate with other existing SaaS used across the “HR stack”. The firm also believes that existing players are split across two categories: those focusing on the long tail of smaller companies, and those addressing massive corporations’ needs. Those in the middle are left underserved. This is the gap Humaans wants to address, by building a platform that enables this massive segment of the market to scale their people operations in a way not possible today.