Planday, the Danish startup that offers a cloud-based “shift planning” solution for various types of businesses that employ a flexible workforce, such as restaurants, hotels, stores, call centers and gyms, has scored $14 million in Series B funding.
The round was led by new investor Idinvest, with participation from existing backer Creandum, which led Planday’s Series A round, in addition to SEB Private Equity, and angel investor Arthur Kosten (co-founder of Booking.com). Notably, Just Eat CEO, Klaus Nyengaard, is also an investor in Planday.
Meanwhile, CEO Christian Brøndum tells me that the new capital will be used by the company to scale in the Nordics, U.K., Germany and U.S., and to help it become a “central player” in the SaaS eco-system servicing part-time workers and businesses. “Thus, partnering with other leaders in our industry is a huge focus area for us going forward,” he says.
This will include Planday further integrating with software offerings that service shift-based businesses, including payroll providers, find and hire services, and Epos technologies.
“Employees use Planday to communicate with their workplace and colleagues on an everyday basis,” explains Brøndum. “Via the app the employee receives messages, notifications and reminders, and they can easily communicate and swap shifts with co-workers with matching skills and availability. They can also bid on open shifts, matching their skills, competences and seniority level, and see their expected and actual salary for the month.”
In turn, the upside for employers using Planday is that they can more easily “create and maintain the optimal schedule,” taking things like staffing needs, budget, employee availability, and workforce regulations into account. “Planday automatically checks up on all these variables when creating or changing the schedule,” he says.
And although direct competitors include the likes of Shiftplanning and 7Shifts, like many SaaS-based startups, Planday’s biggest competitor is still cited as “pen and paper, spreadsheets and calculators”.
“Our analysis shows that more than 80% of the small and medium sized businesses rely on these manual and time consuming solutions,” Brøndum said at the time of the company’s Series A. “However, more and more businesses are changing to modern SaaS software like Planday. Over the next five years we foresee a landslide from manual solutions to SaaS solutions.”
That “landslide” appears to have at least started. The company says it has grown 100 per cent year-on-year, a metric that translates into 100,000 end users — that is, shift-workers active on its platform — in 24 different countries, and roughy 2,000 companies as customers. Its team has also grown to more than 80 people spread across Planday’s five international offices.