- Data-driven employee engagement improvement company Emplify recently announced it raised $15 million in funding led by Edison Partners
Data-driven employee engagement improvement company Emplify announced it has closed $15 million in funding led by Edison Partners. With this funding round, Emplify is planning to reinvest the funds into its core product and service innovation along with expanding its sales and marketing teams to drive future growth. Previous investors including Allos Ventures, Cultivation Capital, Mark Hill, Bob Davoli, and 4G Ventures managing director Bill Godfrey also joined the round.
Since being founded, Emplify has grown year-over-year revenue by more than 275% on average and collected more than 14 million unique employee data points. And Emplify found that within the first year of working with the company, customers see employee engagement scores increase with each consecutive quarter and employee turnover decreases by as much as 50%. Plus many customers have also been reporting saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in labor costs and increasing profit as a result of using Emplify to improve employee engagement with greater clarity and confidence.
“So many big players in the HR tech space assume that simply adding survey functionality ‘checks the box’ on effective employee feedback,” said Santiago Jaramillo, Emplify CEO and author of Amazon best-seller Agile Engagement. “The reality is that bad survey experiences have caused a lot of damage to organizations. Edison’s growth investment, bringing on George Tate as SVP of Sales and Emplify’s customer results confirm our hypothesis: business and people leaders are hungry for a way to collect, analyze and implement employee feedback that actually works to measurably improve employee engagement and performance.”
Along with announcing the funding, Emplify also revealed it hired enterprise sales veteran George Tate as SVP of Sales to propel the company’s growth. Tate is a former VP of Sales at Paylocity where he was instrumental in taking the company from a $17 million private company to an industry-leading public company with a $5.5 billion market cap. And in his 12 years at Paylocity, Tate expanded the sales team from five to more than 270 sales representatives and grew revenue to $105 million.
“Emplify is scientifically tackling the most pertinent issue employers face today: building a culture that attracts, engages and retains talent,” added Ryan Ziegler, general partner at Edison Partners. “Defined business outcomes are tied to measurable business improvements that Emplify’s customers experience in less than 12 months speak for themselves. Santiago Jaramillo and his team have built a superior solution for measuring and continuously improving employee engagement, and we look forward to helping Emplify advance its mission.”
Emplify is considered the only employee engagement company that combines software with human data analysis and expert coaching. And the solution uses employee surveys to score how an employer performs across 17 employee engagement drivers like autonomy, feedback, and psychological safety.
There are several ways the employer can segment the data with the most common, including by department, manager, generation, gender, and role. And Employee Engagement Strategists — which is a role that is a hybrid of data analyst and executive coach — helps business managers analyze survey results and build an action plan to measurably improve engagement.
“Measuring our culture has led to initiatives that are directly improving our team members’ perception of who we are,” explained Rick Lombardo, an executive director of corporate development at Millwood Inc. (an Emplify customer). “As a result, our turnover has dropped by 24 percent. By stabilizing our workforce, we’ve decreased OSHA recordable injuries by 20 percent and increased profit by 24 percent year-over-year.”
There are organizational psychologists and behavioral scientists from three universities who have validated Emplify’s engagement model and survey methodology. For example, Emplify enlisted statisticians like Joshua Hammonds, PhD, professor at Rollins College to confirm the validity and reliability of the survey instrument.
“In my statistical analysis of Emplify’s survey methodology, I found strong reliability and consistency in its ability to predict employee engagement in the workplace,” noted Dr. Hammonds.
