Member Article

North East startup offers new way to ensure employees’ happiness

The annual employee satisfaction survey is becoming increasingly-outdated as working cultures evolve. Business owners and HR managers want to know how their employees feel on a more regular basis and use this information to highlight and fix problems or implement new procedures and training. If only there was a way to gather and measure feedback more often, quickly, and efficiently

Now a North East-based startup is doing just that.

By revolutionising the way in which employee feedback is collected and analysed, Hive.HR want to help businesses of all sizes run more efficiently through happier, more engaged workforces.

The business has just closed out a funding round on online growth and impact investment platform, GrowthFunders. They attracted investment from 37 investors to smash their original funding target of £150,000, going into overfunding, and eventually closing out at £297,650 on January 17th.

The capital raised in this round will be used to accelerate sales by growing their team and investing in marketing as they begin to execute their growth plans.

Hive are well-placed to take on the employee engagement analysis marketplace, as they are borne out of a company who are dedicated to ensuring that their people want to come to work every day.

Award-winning, North East-based, ecommerce giant Visualsoft, are making headlines for the multitude of ways in which they are helping employees to be happier, more engaged, and ultimately more productive. Visualsoft recently relocated their HQ to a building which enabled them to emulate the workplace environments of Silicon Valley dot.com businesses such as Google and in 2014, the company introduced a benefits package for staff which includes unlimited, free holidays and flexitime.

Hive is a spinout of this thinking and was incubated in Visualsoft’s Innovation Lab before launching earlier this year. Former Head of Innovation at Visualsoft, John Ryder, was soon appointed Managing Director of Hive when the concept of an employee engagement tool’s potential was recognised by the team, resulting in the creation of a standalone startup.

Mr Ryder said, “We’re delighted with the success of our funding round on GrowthFunders and this is a really exciting time for us. As well as receiving some fantastic support from the growth and impact platform, our sister company Visualsoft have also been there with us every step of the way. They were recently named in a list of ten North East digital companies with the potential to become a $1billion business by GP Bullhound - one of Europe’s largest tech investment banks.

“We are already revenue-generating and we kick off 2016 with a number of early adopters including Psyche, Paragon UK, Spark Response, and Fusion21. We believe that Hive has the potential to scale rapidly as the focus on HR grows in businesses of all sizes.”

There is potential in this marketplace as a Seattle-based startup, which operates in a similar space to Hive, has shown in the successful closeout of a $6million funding round. The US’s leading pulse survey and peer-to-peer recognition platform, TINYpulse is demonstrating how this kind of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) proposition is scaling in the US. In fact, the story of TINYpulse’s recent funding round offers positive validation for Hive, showing the potential for growth in the UK and the value that can be created in businesses like this.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jenna Taylor .