Feature
Namely, a human resources, payroll, benefits and talent management platform, closed a $50 million Series D round today — the largest of nine rounds to date.
New investors Altimeter Capital and Scale Venture Partners led the round, with participation from Sequoia, Matrix Partners, True Venture, Greenspring and Four Rivers.
Five-year-old New York City-based Namely has now raised $157.8 million, including $30 million in its most recent round last February.
Namely Targets Mid-Size Companies
Matt Straz, founder and CEO of 320-employee Namely, told CMSWire his company will use the money to build new features and modules. It's launching Namely Time, hardware- and software-based tools that allow employers to track the time of hourly workers. Those tools will help Namely expand into the healthcare, retail and manufacturing verticals and will be a core feature on the platform.
"This is a necessity for a lot of companies but especially in the central and southeast parts of the country, which has a significant hourly workforce," Straz said.
Namely has about 650 clients, composed mostly of mid-sized businesses. The HR tech company supports 120,000 employees and $4 billion in annual payroll and has been called a Workday challenger. In 2016, the company hired more than 100 employees, expanded its New York City headquarters to include a product and technology floor, moved into a new office in San Francisco, and opened an office in Austin, Texas.
The company also announced it will introduce Namely Health Advantage, which supports mid-sized companies by giving them access to employee benefits at "preferred rates," which company officials maintain were formerly available only to larger companies.
"For mid-sized companies the two biggest expenses are payroll and benefits," Straz said. "Our goal is to help them make a great workplace by addressing these two pain points. The service aspect has been missing a lot at times."
Data-Driven Compensation Analysis
Straz founded Namely after serving as CMO and co-founder of Pictela, which was acquired by AOL in 2010. Pictela provided global technology for serving high-definition brand content across online advertising and social media.
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Before that, he served as senior partner in global solutions for Mediaedge:CIA, which became MEC, a media agency owned by WPP.
He told CMSWire he found in his experience mid-sized companies always had "pretty bad HR software." It left companies at disadvantages in making data-based company and employee decisions. Namely's software allows companies to use data to determine compensation for high-performing employees.
"I came in from the standpoint of what would the average employee need to do their jobs better," Straz said. "Our products look like consumer software and like social media because that software tends to be easy to use. And you can manage people data better."
C-Suite Hires
Namely has also been busy hiring executives.
The company hired Nick Sanchez as chief people officer. Sanchez started in July after serving as the vice president of people operations at LendingHome for a year, according to his LinkedIn profile. He spent a little more than a year at Trulia in human resources roles and before that had a seven-month stint at LinkedIn as a senior HR business partner.
Sanchez's HR inspiration came from his time working at an Olive Garden Restaurant while he was a student at the University of California — Los Angeles. “This was my true introduction to the concepts of occupational psychology and HR,” he said in a company blog post.
Straz also brought on Brian Crofts as vice president of product in September. He was previously director of product at Intuit, which produces TurboTax. He started there in 2005 and served in various roles.
Crofts led global expansion for QuickBooks, Intuit’s suite of accounting and payroll Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions for small businesses and later found he wanted to "positively impact the HR industry."
In July, Namely also added Manuel Martinez-Herrera as vice president of legal and compliance. He had a four-year-plus role at MetLife before that — as global privacy initiatives leader and assistant general counsel/corporate counsel. He has more than 10 years of experience as a lawyer in three continents.
