News: Employee-focused HR tech app Hush raises Rs 4.5 Cr in funding

Funding & Investment

Employee-focused HR tech app Hush raises Rs 4.5 Cr in funding

Hush will use the proceeds to expand the team, grow the platform’s user base, and launch new features on the app.
Employee-focused HR tech app Hush raises Rs 4.5 Cr in funding

Hush, the employee-focused HR tech firm, has raised Rs 4.5 Cr in a fresh round of funding from existing investors, Accel, Shamik Sharma, Business Head at Curefit, and an angel investor.

With this round of funding, the go-to workplace app for employees has added Nikhil Raj, Co-Founder of Paysa.com, to their advisory board.

Ashutosh Dabral, Co-Founder of Hush, stated, “We are extremely thrilled to have received support from Accel as it adds a lot of credibility to our existing business model. Excited with the increased demand from our consumers, our fresh raise is focused on expanding our technology to include a wider range of audiences with more use cases. The expanded capital base will also help us build better features, expand the team, and develop the platform’s user base.”

The funding round comes on the back of a healthy growth in user acceptance of the platform, which Dabral claims has crossed over 300 companies. The company now caters to 40,000 employees from these 300+ companies through its app. At present, a user spends an average of 10 minutes per day on the app. In the future, the platform hopes to onboard an additional 1,000 companies within a year. 

The fresh raise will strengthen the brand’s growth narrative and help them reach out to a wider audience through the introduction of cutting-edge technology. With the inclusion of new-age tech, Hush looks to create more features for employees to have access to. In addition, it will also help the team to increase its headcount to 20 people.

Founded in September 2017 by Ashutosh Dabral and Umesh Joshi Chandra, the real trigger to launch the app stemmed from the founders’ beliefs that there was no real way for employees to voice their true opinions in their companies. By building an app which allowed employees to voice their opinions anonymously, Hush wanted to foster better engagement for employees.

In May this year, validation in terms of the idea came in the form of a seed funding round led by early-stage venture capital firm Accel and saw participation from Sanjay Nadkarni, country manager at Houzz India and a bevy of angel investors.

Speaking to People Matters, Ashutosh revealed that while earlier startup employees were the largest set of users but now employees from bigger companies form the majority of the user base and are finding value on the platform.

With this growth trajectory, the platform is on the path to becoming a platform that can be a companion throughout an employee’s career and help them move to the next level. In this direction, a new website was launched last month. The website aims to be an authentic source of information about a company, including details such as salary levels, culture, among others. The HRtech firm is also building a large scale machine learning model to predict salary levels and help people evaluate what salary they will be able to get based on their skill levels. It also provides career advice to employees via a network of experts.

As per Deloitte Consulting LLP, the HR technology marketplace is a $400 Bn market globally. It is estimated that Indian firms can save at least $600 Mn annually with HR tech. How fast will this funding help Hush to propel its growth plans amidst competition from other firms focused on engagement will be something to watch out for.

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Topics: Funding & Investment, Employee Engagement, #HRTechMarket

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