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Talent lifecycle company Platypus raises $2.5m

Platypus, the software-as-a-service that measures and optimises the person-organisation alignment for businesses, announces today that it raised $2.5 million from social impact fund Mustard Seed MAZE, the Nordic technology fund Inventure, the Danish state’s investment fund Vaekstfonden and others.

With the global pandemic sweeping across the planet, remote work went global overnight. Now more than ever, businesses are challenged to address new needs and expectations from their employees.

While most solutions in the HR Tech space focus on individual performance and engagement scores to cope with this problem, Platypus measures, analyses and tracks the alignment of an individual’s values with the culture and values of an organisation.

The solution helps transform company culture from a static, top-down mission statement into adaptable, measurable data of what employees actually value in a company.

“The average cost of staff turnover is $50k per employee, and as high as 200% of the base salary for highly-skilled roles. This presents a major problem for many companies in today’s market, especially as they are transitioning to more flextime and remote work options,” explains Platypus’s CEO Nico Blier-Silvestri.

“The future of work, whether remote or not, is all about finding smart ways to cope with retention issues. Close to 90% of the early-leavers⁠—that is, people who leave their employer within the first 18 months on the job—do so because of the cultural misalignment, and we know for a fact that a technology like Platypus can be game-changing for businesses for years to come.”

Despite the upsides benefits, working remotely also comes with a cost: communication and collaboration among team members can be challenging and employees may also feel more lonely and isolated.

By failing to understand and adapt to employee needs and expectations, companies struggle to motivate and retain talent in such a competitive landscape.

“Platypus reframes the way businesses measure and leverage organisational alignment to maximise employee satisfaction and retention”, says Orson Stadler, Senior Principal at Mustard Seed MAZE, a Lisbon-based impact fund that invests across Europe.

“We spend a significant part of our lives at work, reinforcing the need for a strong sense of engagement, satisfaction and performance within our jobs. The founding team comes with a solid industry background in HR, giving them a clear advantage and differentiated approach in this vertical.”

Linus Dahg from Inventure, a Nordic technology Venture Capital firm says, “The market is clearly ripe for new innovative solutions to solve this major problem.

“We’re delighted to be working together with Nico and his team to build a product that will do just that; help businesses make faster and better-informed people-focused decisions, whilst also supporting talents around the world in finding companies they’d love to work for.

Platypus was founded in February 2019 by Nico Blier-Silvestri and Daniel Bowen. Within 10 months of its launch, the company is already across several markets to establish an optimal person-organisation alignment, and thus minimise their retention costs. The company will use the investment to accelerate its early-stage growth and customer traction.

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