All-in-one HR Platform Takes over the Universe

Author

Moshe Ohana
April 21, 2024

What's inside:

The Markets

💸 $13.4 BILLION 

All-in-one HR platform, (I feel like I’ve typed that phrase dozens of time since starting this publication) Rippling, is reported to be in talks about a series F round with a post money valuation of $13.4B. This comes just just over a year after they announced their $11.25B series E round.

The series F is set to raise $200M in new funds with an additional $670M worth of shares exchanging hands between existing investors.

So what is exactly is Rippling and why are they one of the hottest names in Silicon Valley?

Rippling was founded by serial entrepreneur Parker Conrad and his co-founder Prasanna Sankar. Prior to founding Rippling in 2016, Parker co-founded several successful companies including Zenefits (acquired by Trinet) in late 2012.

Parker and team built Rippling for 2 years in stealth and publicly launched the platform in October 2018 as the “First Employee Management System”. More specifically, Parker branded the software as a “system for employee information that connects to all your key business systems and automates manual processes across the entire company, not just HR.”

Since 2018, Rippling has launched dozens of products and in October of 2022, Rippling launched their Global Payroll and EOR products. They positioned themselves as the only one in the market not leveraging partners. They said that “the existing “global” payroll companies are faking it”. This is a bold claim but I think it brings up a good question:

Should EORs strive to own their entity infrastructure or is relying on payroll and EOR partners around the globe still sufficient? 

Work From Home

❌ Nike & Dell Can’t Seem to Figure Out WFH

If I had a dollar for every headline about Nike not being able to innovate because the employees worked from home for 2 months, I wouldn’t be writing this newsletter each week.

(Kidding, I would! I would never let down my readers 😜) 

Nike CEO, John Donahoe, cited working from home as the cause of the company’s lacking innovation over the last couple of years.

Donahoe is quoted in a CNBC article saying “What’s been missing is the kind of bold, disruptive innovation that Nike’s known for and when we look back, the reasons are fairly straightforward”.

In a similar move, Dell told employees that they’d give up career advancement opportunities within the company unless they were classified as a hybrid worker which requires 3 in office days per week.

Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell, authored a LinkedIn article in 2022 praising remote work and even cited a Dell study that found “no meaningful differences for team members working remotely or office-based”.

That aged well, huh? 

New Launch

👋 You can now Hi(re) Bob

HiBob, an HR platform originally launched in the UK as a response to recent UK pension regulations at the time, just released some big news.

HiBob was founded by a team of Israeli co-founders and has expanded their platform to Global Core HR, Time & Attendance, People Analytics, and several other products.

Most recently, however, HiBob announced the launch of its brand new ATS (applicant tracking system) called Bob Hiring. After reading through some more information on the new offering, HiBob noted the following on their product page: Bob Hiring rounds out Bob as an all-in-one solution, providing a full picture of your people from plan-to-hire to retire.

I’m here again posting about an “all-in-one” solution in the HR tech stack. It seems like every platform in the HR Tech world is striving to attain that holy grail “all-in-one” designation.

Can’t a company just be very good at one thing and be happy? 

Strategic quick hits