Durham-based workplace software platform Peoplelogic announced today that it has raised $1.9 million in pre-seed funding.
The round was led by the North Carolina Venture Capital Fund (NCVCF) and San Francisco-based Underdog Labs, while other local angel investors included Spiffy CEO Scot Wingo, Kevel CEO James Avery and Corevist COO Susan Wall.
With the capital infusion, Peoplelogic has hired a Chief Product Officer and engineering staff. They also plan to hire for customer success and sales and marketing roles to further help in customer acquisition, said Founder and CEO Matt Schmidt. (Schmidt was a previously a Co-Founder of DZone, which successfully exited to a private equity firm in 2017; he talked about that as a guest on our Exit Stories podcast.)
Peoplelogic’s mission has centered around improving organizational health since it was founded two and a half years ago. (We first profiled Peoplelogic in March, 2020.) In that time, Peoplelogic has built models and algorithms that provide critical early warning signs to businesses.
These can predict employee attrition and offer a standardized score for an organization’s overall health. Peoplelogic has synthesized over 21 million employee interactions for its clients to better understand their team health and operational efficiency and has had hundreds of companies use its platform.
Peoplelogic’s platform is helping companies as they face new ways of working, larger hybrid teams and a “Great Resignation.” With AI and machine learning, Peoplelogic’s client companies get specific recommendations to improve team engagement and can even see a “StayFactor,” which is a predictive score for each employee’s likelihood of staying at the company.
While traditionally companies use surveys to solicit employee feedback, Peoplelogic operates in the background, connecting to existing tools to provide hidden insights.
Before Peoplelogic, Schmidt co-founded DZone Media and AnswerHub, where he saw the greater need for a platform like Peoplelogic to help leaders get insight into team performance. At DZone, they faced the typical organizational surprises of employees burning out and high performers not achieving the results they expected.
“Along the way, we also did a ton of things wrong,” Schmidt said. “That all came down to our organizational health and understanding that we needed to leverage the data that was at our fingertips but often fell through the cracks.”
DZone had its typical engagement surveys and performance reviews, but nothing could compare to the information lying in the tools that the team used every day: Slack, Salesforce and HubSpot. Compared to that, the surveys couldn’t help them prevent employee attrition at all.
“It was all reactive,” Schmidt said. “And none of it could tell us where we needed to look early enough for us to be able to take action on it before it was too late.”
This was a key element that made Peoplelogic attractive to investors.
“Surveys are helpful, but are always ‘too little, too late,’” Wingo said in a statement. “I view Peoplelogic as building a ‘Fitbit for the org’ which has huge value to any business— especially when we are dealing with the changing future of work married with the Great Resignation.”
Richard Holcomb, general partner at co-lead investor NCVCF (and a former Exit Stories guest), said in a statement that over his career, simplifying the complexities of data has been a common thread in his companies and investments. That made Peoplelogic a great fit for NCVCF’s portfolio.
“The ease at which Peoplelogic takes complex data and makes it simple and actionable to improve operational efficiencies is one of the things that intrigued me most about Peoplelogic’s approach,” Holcomb said.
“People want simple”
Over the past few years, Schmidt realized through his experience at DZone and Peoplelogic that what got you there before as a founder won’t always get you there again. Peoplelogic was built in the midst of a pandemic, and more than ever, customers want something easy to digest, he said.
“What we’ve learned is that people want simple,” Schmidt said.
Getting leaders those actionable next steps in just a few minutes per day is vital. And that’s what the team is focused on moving forward.
Schmidt said the $1.9 million in funding is validation for what they are building and will help move the ball for the company. In 2022, Peoplelogic aims to scale upon its vision for the platform as a “Fitbit for your organization” and foster widespread customer acquisition.
“The goals moving forward are really to start to build a place where we’ve got raving fans around our platform, to build those customers that can tell our story for us,” Schmidt said.
