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- Confetti raises money and a new EOR is born
Confetti raises money and a new EOR is born
Do we really need these things in our lives?
Moshe Ohana
March 31, 2024
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What's inside:
The Markets$16M for office parties?
New York based, Confetti, just closed a $16M series A round led by Entrée Capital and IN Venture to help fuel its growth in 2024.
In 2017, after several years of running her own corporate event planning agency, Confetti CEO and Founder, Lee Rubin, decided to start a new company (Confetti) that focused on helping companies organize events in the office. Within 2 weeks of the world shutting down in March of 2020, Rubin and her co-founder, Eyal Hakim, quickly pivoted the business to focus more on virtual events.
After 7 years of being in business, with 4 of those years being fueled by post pandemic work from home growth, Confetti has hit the following milestones:
$15-20M in annual revenue by EOY 2024
8,000 customer including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta
1,100,000+ seats booked to participate in Confetti experiences
#124 on the 2023 Inc 5000
Teams can access Confetti’s website and see their collection of experiences. Experiences include party games, yoga classes, and a variety of cultural trivia games.
Confetti doesn’t have an active G2 profile but according to their testimonial page on their website, users from customers including Zoom, Lemonade, Stripe, Adobe, and TikTok are all extremely happy with the platform and its results.
In our return to work reality, one may wonder if a company that enables remote and hybrid teams to have fun will succeed. Are the office ping pong tables, kombucha taps, and pizza parties simply being replaced by virtual yoga and taco piñata making classes?
How can we truly engage employees at work in a way that truly encourages collaboration, innovation, satisfaction?
Around the worldSwiping right for a job in China
Young job seekers in China have resorted to dating apps to find employment.
NBC News interviewed 26 year old Jade Liang, a master’s student in Shanghai, for an article they published on this phenomenon.
Jade said she applied to over 400 jobs with no luck. She’s now starting to use Tinder as a way to Network. She said “I simply swiped right on individuals in the industry I aspire to join”. Once she gets a match, she is clear about her intentions and the responses are generally positive.
It’s not surprising that job seekers like Jade are leveraging any and all methods of networking to find employment. All you need to do is scroll through LinkedIn or TikTok for a few minutes and you’ll begin to see the hundreds of posts by desperate unemployed or underemployed people globally.
Despite all of this, however, it seems that every day there is a new job board that launches. Companies are looking for talent and talent is looking for work yet the two groups can’t seem to find each other.
Global Payroll & EORHelios.io teases new product
Industry vet and founder of Atlas, Rick Hammell, just launched his new company, Helios.io. Did he just launch a competitor to the company he previously founded?
If you go to the website, it isn’t clear as to what product or service Helios actually provides. It makes mention of HXM, Payments, Insights, and Solutions which are all very vague. If you click through and try to join their beta group, you’ll be prompted to answer which of the following you currently use:
Agent of Record
Contractor Pay
Employer of Record (EOR)
Global Payroll
Global Staffing Services
If you navigate to Rick’s profile, you’ll note the mission of Helios as “Empowering businesses with next generation, enterprise-grade software to manage a dynamic workforce of any size, shape, or location.”. Again, this is all fairly vague.
I then found this interview from March 13th. Rick talks about onboarding and offboarding with Melanie Pizzey and they start talking about Employer of Record (EOR) around minute 30:30.
Rick mentions that he was the one that actually coined the term “Employer of Record” (I can’t verify this but I have no reason not to believe this). He then went on to talk about why he founded Helios.
When he was at Atlas, he saw customers “graduating” from EOR and then having to find another platform and solution to handle their evolving needs.
Helios seems to be a 3-in-1 platform that provides EOR, contractor payments, and global payroll solutions. It is certainly not the first of its kind and many EORs have tested and launched successful contractor and global payroll solutions.
So how will Helios really differentiate itself? Honestly, I’m not sure but I’m excited to find out.
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