Knoetic Raises Another $36 Million To Become Chief People Officer’s Go-To Platform

Building a culture of engagement is critical in today’s competitive workforce. Employees need to be engaged and given the opportunity to grow in order for the organization to scale to achieve its strategic and operational goals. Organizations are devoting more and more resources to understanding their employees’ capabilities, motivations and how they align with long-term and short-term company goals. Noetic is a platform built by Chief People Officers for Chief People Officers. The platform is a workforce analytics platform with his CPOHQ, a unique active professional community component that connects thousands of Chief People Officers to support each other and provide best practices. On the analytical side, CPOs can better understand their role by integrating data from over 60 HR systems to provide unprecedented company HR-related metrics such as DEI, performance, compensation, retention, and turnover. Take an unprecedented data-driven approach to In 2020, the company grew his ARR by 5x, his community by 20x, and his team by 3x.

alley watch We spoke with the founder and CEO of Knoetic Joseph Quan To learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, the latest funding round bringing the total raised to $54 million, and more…

Who are your investors and how much did you raise?

Raised a $36 million Series B. EQT VenturesWe are very excited to partner with Ali Mitchell @EQT. He will also join the board of directors. Menlo Ventures (JP Sunday) also participates as a new investor, existing investor accelerator (Vas Natarajan) is the Series A lead, doubling in the round.

They are part of a syndicate of over 100 angel investors, including Adam Grant, Pamela Thomas Graham, Gokul Rajaram, and CPOs such as Bill.com, Front, Zapier, Box, Calendly, ScaleAI, and Calm.

We’ve raised over $50 million in Series A and B combined!

What products or services does Knoetic offer?

Knoetic’s vision is to be the most powerful platform ever built for Chief People Officers. Over the past decade, the CPO had two new needs for him. Be more quantitative, data-driven, and strategic.

We did this by building two products integrated on the same platform.

(1) A talent analytics tool that gives CPOs immediate quantitative insights into turnover, diversity, headcount growth, and more. Knoetic integrates with her 60+ of her HR systems to provide leaders with a single source of truth to perform comprehensive talent analysis, saving hundreds of hours of talent data back and forth .

(2) The CPO community, called CPOHQ, provides CPOs with thousands of peer strategies, plans, benchmarks, and playbooks to tackle today’s most pressing people/workforce challenges.

What inspired you to start Knoetic?

Knoetic was built in response to a major paradigm shift in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic (March 2020) with the rise of Chief People Officers and Strategic People (HR) functions.

The past decade, and especially the past two years, has seen a significant expansion of the CPO’s responsibilities, tasks, and influence. 2020 and all its challenges have made CEOs and boards aware of how important it is to have a strategic HR function.

Knoetic provides chief human resources officers with quantitative and qualitative insights to navigate these difficult hurdles. Recent discussions within Knoetic/CPOHQ touch on “Quiet Quitting,” The Great Resignation, Response to the Recession, Roe v. Wade, Hiring Freeze, COVID Protocol, Employee Engagement, and DEI metrics.

How is Knoetic different?

The past decade, and especially the past two years, has seen a significant expansion of the CPO’s responsibilities, tasks, and influence. 2020 and all its challenges have made CEOs and boards aware of how important it is to have a strategic HR function.

Knoetic provides chief human resources officers with quantitative and qualitative insights to navigate these difficult hurdles. Recent discussions within Knoetic/CPOHQ touch on “Quiet Quitting,” The Great Resignation, Response to the Recession, Roe v. Wade, Hiring Freeze, COVID Protocol, Employee Engagement, and DEI metrics.

What is Knoetic’s target market and size?

In the short term, our focus is on serving Chief People Officers and their teams, but this is a small market just for us. We will expand from there.

Longer term, we are targeting a $30 billion market for what we call “people decision making and analytics.”

what is your business model?

Chief People Officers accepted into CPOHQ will have free access to all resources including forums, benchmarks, playbooks, meetups and roundtables.

When the people analysis is ready, the CPO buys our SaaS product. We set our prices according to the size of the company.

How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown??

A pervasive technology slowdown will only increase the need for solutions that support strategic HR functions.

Teams are being asked to do more with less. By eliminating the need for manually aggregated reports, Knoetic serves as a time-of-day extension for these teams when they need it most, enabling them to quickly derive the insights critical to the success of their HR function. Save time each week to spread the word.

What was the fundraising process like?

Fortunately, we were able to procure it in a two week sprint. Our strong market traction, customer loyalty and brand recognition all contributed to the swift process.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in raising capital?

Spread the vision of building two highly complex products simultaneously: a community and a data platform.

What factors in your business are driving investors to write you checks?

We are a prime example of community-driven growth, running the largest executive network of over 2,000 Chief People Officers from the most strategic companies. Our community acts as a deep moat and quickly stands out as a differentiator.

We are also in a hot space at the perfect time to support the rise of strategic, data-driven HR functions.

In many ways, the rise of CPOs mirrors the rise of CROs and CMOs over the past decade. HR is still five to ten years behind sales, marketing, and customer tech in its analytical capabilities. HR software is still not great and many people still use manual spreadsheets for data analysis.

Knoetic is leading the way for the next generation of strategic, data-driven CPO.

What milestones do you plan to achieve in the next six months?

This fundraiser has three specific goals.

First, we are shipping a set of new people analytics capabilities for Chief People Officers and their teams. It includes features such as custom dashboards, empowering HR teams, department leaders, and frontline managers to build their own narratives and stories using HR data.

The second is to strengthen the CPO community. We deploy an intimate program of IRL executives only, as well as enhanced benchmarks and reports, to provide our members with actionable, high-value reports.

The third is to hire top talent. Getting the right people (“Knoeticons”) means everything to us. We have very high standards for talent and he tripled the number of employees year-over-year. Since our last round, we’ve added leaders from top tech companies including Square, Drift, Amazon, Handshake, and Amplitude. He continues to be actively recruited in product, engineering and his GTM team.

What advice can you give to New York companies that haven’t injected fresh capital into their banks?

your burn multiple Discreetly do monthly financial check-ins/adjustments, manage cash, and cut to 15+ months on the bank runway. It’s all about survival.

your burn multiple Discreetly do monthly financial check-ins/adjustments, manage cash, and cut to 15+ months on the bank runway. It’s all about survival.

Where do you see the company going now in the near future?

In the short term, our focus is on ‘Act 1’ supporting the CPO and their team. Providing the best platform for his CPO ever. And follow “Act 2!”

What is your favorite restaurant in the city?

Went to Masa recently and it’s as good as they say.

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