Wisq, a leader in Agentic HR and the creator of the first AI HR Generalist, announced a $15 million funding round from existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Shasta Ventures, and True Ventures. This funding will enhance Wisq’s mission to pioneer the era of Agentic HR by transforming HR operations to be both AI-driven and more human-centered.
HRLM: In conjunction with this announcement, Wisq is introducing HRLM, the first large language model specifically designed for the complex and policy-oriented domain of enterprise HR. HRLM is optimized for accuracy, compliance, and speed in areas such as HR service delivery, policy interpretation and enforcement, performance management, employee relations, and risk assessment, all at a significantly lower cost than general-purpose reasoning models. HRLM is engineered to support Wisq’s AI HR Generalist, Harper, delivering the necessary speed, accuracy, and reliability to meet the demands of enterprise HR teams.
Hurdle: Wisq is also launching Hurdle, the industry’s first benchmark to assess AI performance on HR-specific tasks like employee relations, performance feedback, and policy interpretation. HRLM demonstrates competitive performance on Hurdle compared to advanced reasoning models such as OpenAI o3, while offering improved speed and reduced costs.
How the funding will be used: The additional funding will support ongoing development of AI and platform capabilities, along with the expansion of Wisq’s engineering and go-to-market teams.
KEY QUOTES:
“The future of AI in HR isn’t a chatbot. It’s a colleague. We built HRLM because HR requires better than general-purpose AI — and because the work HR does is too important to be handled generically.”
“AI First & Deeply Human — that’s the way forward for HR. And Wisq is building the agentic platform, the team, and now the LLM to make it real.”
Jim Barnett, Wisq’s CEO and Co-Founder
