Annual performance reviews are often more like an annual headache for both managers and employees. Impraise, a startup that wants to streamline the process with a mobile app, just raised $1.6 million in seed funding. Investors include Palm Drive Ventures, China Growth Capital, and HenQ.
A Y Combinator alum, Impraise launched in 2014 with the goal of helping workers get more immediate evaluations while reducing the amount of human resources busywork their bosses need to process. Its enterprise users now include Atlassian, Booking.com, M&C Saatchi, and IDEO. Impraise’s founders previously told TechCrunch that they founded Impraise after getting very little feedback at former jobs, which meant they had very few learning opportunities and felt stalled in their careers.
Over the past couple of years, Impraise’s team has grown from five members to 21. It moved its headquarters from Los Altos to New York City and also opened a new office in Amsterdam, co-founder and CEO Bas Kohnke tells TechCrunch. The company’s seed will be used for hiring, integrating with more human resources software, new features, and improving its analytics platform.
Kohnke says that many of its potential enterprise clients use legacy HR software like SAP SuccessFactors, Cornerstone OnDemand, and Oracle. Some have switched to Workday, which can be used with Impraise to manage employee evaluations.
“Many companies, however, still rely on Word documents or Excel sheets for their performance reviews, so in that case even a Word document would play as a competitor for us,” he adds.
Impraise helps supervisors by letting them provide evaluations immediately after a meeting or project. Colleagues can also share feedback with one another, anonymously if they want. Ratings and other metrics are recorded and used by Impraise’s analytics tools, with the idea of making reports more transparent and objective instead of relying solely on a manager’s opinion.
Kohnke says Impraise’s target market is still the United States, where many large companies are currently improving their performance review systems, but it is also seeking new clients in Europe.