HR automation platform, Omni HR today announced it has recently closed USD 2.4 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round co-led by Alpha JWC Ventures and Picus Capital, with participation from FEBE Ventures, Basis Set Ventures, Ratio Ventures, and Frances Kang at Horizons Ventures. This round was also supported by a number of prominent angel investors including former executives at Namely and Ultimate Software.
Founded in 2021 by former Goldman Sachs executive Brian Ip and experienced data engineer YC Chan, Omni HR provides a seamless employee management system that helps companies digitize and automate the end-to-end employee lifecycle in a single platform.
According to Omni HR Co-Founder Brian Ip, “Most companies in Southeast Asia are currently using local HR software that supports only basic admin functions, leaving many HR processes to be done manually. Meanwhile, HR software is one of the software categories that require the most localization, due to the differing employment rules in different countries. This effectively creates a unique opportunity for local players to build a modern, scalable employee management platform based out of Southeast Asia.”
Omni HR is witnessing that the market is going through a shift from traditional HR or payroll software to more advanced, modern solutions addressing the end-to-end employee journey. Omni HR’s goal is to become the employee management platform that enables organizations to digitize employee records, automate administrative tasks, and interact employee data seamlessly across different systems. Omni HR believes that with the ongoing digital transformation and software adoption trends in Southeast Asia, its employee management platform would ultimately become an important piece of software infrastructure for the region.
Since its soft launch in March 2022, Omni HR has been adopted by a number of companies to automate manual HR processes such as employee onboarding, time off management, and document management. The company is now coming out of its stealth mode and is ready to expand across the region, starting with Singapore and Indonesia.
“Our initial traction has been promising and we’re off to a great start,” says Omni HR Co-Founder YC Chan. “We are better than incumbents not only because of our superior tech solutions, but also because of our understanding of the local context which enables us to design a product fitting our customer needs.”
The investors in this round are bringing in a unique combination of operational know-hows and strategic support. Alpha JWC is the investor in various leading Southeast Asian startups including Ajaib, Carro and Spenmo, while Picus Capital has extensive experience investing in HR tech companies such as Personio, Bennie and Workmotion.
With the new funding, the company will further enhance its all-in-one product offering, including the launch of a recruitment module by Q3 and a performance management module by Q4, respectively.
“Omni is building an end-to-end HR suite that covers the entire employee life cycle and automates the repetitive workflow to help the management handle their people operations. With solutions that cater to problems faced by most, if not all, kinds of companies, we believe Omni HR has the unique potential to grow fast and become the region’s HR SaaS of choice,” says Jefrey Joe, Co-Founder and General Partner at Alpha JWC Ventures.
“While the HR function is the most crucial one in every business, we believe that the Southeast Asian market is still a white space with no comprehensive and localized tool to manage a workforce efficiently and offer a strong employee experience. Omni HR has built a clearly superior solution by going beyond basic administrative functionality into automating repetitive workflows like onboarding in the HR departments. This need has been especially accelerated by an increasing number of software being used in a company and an increasingly remote workforce which is harder to manage with traditional IT infrastructure,” says Florian Reichert, Partner & Managing Director at Picus Capital.