Today German HRtech startup Back Technologies, the employee service platform, announces that it has raised a seed round of around €2.9 million. The startup aims to help employees get their requests at work solved quicker, especially in this era of remote working, when face-to-face interactions are minimal and digital communications can easily get forgotten.
The investment was led by La Famiglia, with participation from Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused venture fund) and angel investors such as Charles Songhurst (Microsoft’s former Head of Corporate Strategy), Matthias Hilpert (Orange’s former Board Member), Renaud Visage (Eventbrite’s founder), and the founders of Tourlane and Personio. Existing investors Point Nine Capital and Seedcamp also participated in the seed round.
From a broken keyboard, to finding payslips from last year, to getting a copy of company policy, there can be any number of issues that an employee can request help to solve. Add in email, messaging services like Slack, and workflow platforms, and HR managers and team leaders can easily lose track of such requests, leaving employees floating without an answer.
This is where Back comes in. Its cloud-based employee service platform seamlessly integrates with popular workplace chat software (such as Slack) to quickly solve and manage employee requests. Many of these messages are repetitive employee requests, which Back can help to solve automatically by combining case management, project management, and knowledge automation.
So how does it work in more detail? Thanks to the software, a concierge bot for employees on Slack automatically answers questions based on previous answers or related knowledge documents. Alternatively, it will route the request to the appropriate team, and keep the employee updated on its progress. The platform offers 1-click integrations with knowledge management systems like Confluence and core HR systems like BambooHR and Personio to find related information for any request. Current customers include some of the fastest-growing tech companies in Europe, such as Choco, Marley Spoon, Personio, and Statista.
“Using Back, we’re able to better serve our employees and help our team to work more efficiently. The technology has allowed us to reduce our response time to within a day and our resolution times by 71% on average,” said Laura Christenhuß, People Operations Manager at Marley Spoon.
With this new funding, the company plans to grow its market presence in the US, while also expanding across Europe. It plans to hire new talent for engineering, marketing and sales roles and hopes to double its team this year.
“Companies are struggling to rapidly adapt to digital communication environments. Back provides employees with a seamless experience while also helping companies reduce workload through clever automation. This is a game changer for any team in our hectic and remote work environment,” said Christian Eggert, CEO and cofounder of Back Technologies. “We’re pleased to have the support from our new investors which will help us to service more customers around the globe.”
“The remote-work economy is here to stay and existing solutions for internal case management are failing to meet the needs of workers,” said Darian Shirazi, General Partner at Gradient Ventures. “We’re excited by Back’s novel solution to automate the development of internal content and answer the questions workers have to excel at their jobs.”