HR startup Zelt announced on Thursday that it had secured $3.5M (€3.13M) in seed funding from Episode 1 Ventures, Village Global, and notable angel investors Charlie Songhurst, Mandeep Singh, Felix Leuschner, and Daniel Hegarty.
The UK-based startup, which specialises in IT and payroll automation, plans to employ its recent funding to bolster marketing endeavours and meet the escalating demands of a larger and more global customer base.
Zelt offers businesses an all-in-one platform to handle various divisions – human resources, IT and financial operations – throughout the employee journey. This integration streamlines vendor management and automates various employee-related tasks, including HR, payroll, onboarding and expenses.
“Until now, companies needed to piece together a number of different tools in order to run even basic people operations, due to the limited scope of the existing tools available,” Zelt founder and CEO, Chris Priebe, says. “This made it difficult for companies to take a holistic approach, not to mention facilitate automation and self-service options.”
Streamlining HR operations
According to recent studies by Ernst & Young and CM, HR professionals spend 86% of their time on HR administrative work. Yet, 85% of employees find it challenging to access information about general company procedures.
In order to address this gap and streamline operations, Zelt’s all-in-one platform supports employees throughout their lifecycle, offering comprehensive services and improved data security.
Zelt’s platform consolidation reduces the need for companies to transfer employee data between systems, resulting in improved data security and governance. These upgrades effectively address the National Cyber Security Centre’s concerns over recent incidents of sensitive employee record exposures.
Zelt’s customer base has also been rapidly expanding as it scales its offerings for midmarket clients. Among its clients are several fast-growing tech startups and medium-sized businesses, including One Trading, Two Inc, Deblock, Mumsnet, and One Dome.
Top investors
Episode 1 is a venture fund focused on investing in early-stage UK-based technology companies. Managed by former entrepreneurs, it specialises in pre-seed and seed investments and has a track record of early investments in many successful companies, including Carwow, Robin.ai, Huboo, Sano Genetics, Raft.ai, Attest, Omnipresent, and CloudNC.
Village Global, an early-stage venture capital firm, supports Zelt’s vision to simplify administrative workloads, recognising the platform as one of the leading solutions for enhancing HR processes. The VC is backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.
“In the US, many of our portfolio companies have already replaced their HRIS with a more powerful platform such as Rippling, and seen immediate customer ROI. This trend is now spreading across the globe, and Zelt is one of the best products we have seen in the market,” says Anne Dwane, co-founder and partner at Village Global.
“So we are extremely keen to support Chris as he continues to further improve the product and scale internationally.”
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