By Riley Kaminer
Personnel management. Payroll. Recruitment. These aren’t necessarily the tasks that make startup founders excited to get up in the morning. Yet they’re critical to make businesses thrive.
So why not automate it? In a context where around half of tasks can be automated, only about a third of HR tasks have been automated.
The team from Barcelona scaleup Factorial believes that needs to change. The company offers HR software, primarily targeting small and medium-sized businesses. Factorial’s platform provides tools for managing various HR functions such as employee records, time tracking, payroll processing, performance evaluations, and benefits administration.
Factorial ultimately aims to centralize and automate HR tasks – enhancing efficiency for its users. Its software is noted for its user-friendly design and compatibility with other business tools.
Now, Factorial is doubling down on its presence in North America, with Miami as its focal point. Around 40 of its 1,400 employees are based in Miami already (yes, that’s some of the Miami team pictured above on Halloween this year). Founded in 2016, unicorn Factorial has raised over $220 million across three rounds of funding.
“We know we need to attack the US and Canadian markets with products that are localized for these markets,” Peter Santis, Factorial’s Head of North America [pictured below], told Refresh Miami. “That’s a big part of our focus today.”
Santis, a Boston native, has lived in Miami for two decades and been active in the Miami startup scene, including as the Chief Revenue Officer for CAST AI and the Head of Sales in the Americas for Rocket.Chat.
The key for Factorial, according to Santis, is to articulate exactly how Factorial can enable SMBs to digitize historically manual HR processes. “Traditional HR is paper based,” he said. “But we’ve brought them to the cloud and empowered people – not just HR managers but team leaders, employees, individual contributors – to actively participate in that workflow.”
“That’s a modern approach,” he continued, underscoring just how important UI/UX is to Factorial and drawing parallels between the scaleup and more traditional HR tech players.
From a product perspective, the next frontier for Factorial is artificial intelligence. “Everyone is looking at AI – how can we save 30-50% of time by using AI,” said Santis. In his estimation, this time saving opportunity extends far and wide in the world of HR: from recruitment to promoting wellbeing to bolstering diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
Santis understands the problems Factorial’s customers face firsthand, having co-founded a nearshoring company that had 75 employees. “If you’re an HR manager or you own your own business, having a dashboard with everything in front of you is invaluable.” Having that data at your fingertips enables companies to make better decisions more quickly. “It’s about distilling data in a coherent way, making it actionable quickly.”
Looking forward, beyond expanding to serve more customers in North America, Santis expects to see Factorial get involved in more M&A activity like its recent acquisition of Fuell. Santis is also excited to keep hiring across the board in Miami, with a particular focus on areas such as sales, marketing, and customer success.
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