Blowing up the re-location industry, Move Guides raises $48M Series C

Whatever any country leader says about banning travel or shutting down the movement of people, the world is accelerating its globalisation and that means people move around. Duh. Talent is now global, and the industry that helps that talent move is huge.

Thus it is that Move Guides — a SaaS platform for employee relocation which launched in London but has grown internationally — has closed $48 million in a Series C funding from Future Fund, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Notion Capital. That takes its total raised to $91M since it began aiming at disrupting traditional relocation management, a market worth $11 billion, by some estimates.

The Series C round will be used for growing market share for its platform, (currently growing at 200% annually) and infrastructure. It previously secured a $15.6 million in Series B funding and prior to that a $8.2 Million Series A.

Competitors included incumbents like Cartus and SIRVA, but Move Guides is aimed at companies which usually outsource employee relocation and need talent mobility monitoring, not just relocation on its own. Its “Talent Mobility Cloud” smashes together companies, employees and global vendors (shipping, real estate, immigration, tax etc) all into a single platform to solve the headache for HR departments which have to deal with global mobile workforces as they move around projects and relocate. Move Guides claims it can save a company 10 per cent on all the associated costs, which is a lot for these big global companies.

Move Guides founder and CEO, Brynne Kennedy, says: “The change we’re driving in the market is profound. MOVE Guides’TalentMobility Cloud enables global organizations to turn workforce mobility into a true competitive advantage. Our customers include market leaders across financial services, manufacturing, and technology and other sectors who are all gaining business advantages through more agile and data driven global mobility.”

What’s the scale of the opportunity? Well Aragon Research estimates the current global mobility market will reach $11B by 2023. This money is currently spent on outdated relocation companies (so-called BPOs) but is shifting to cloud platforms as companies demand technology and data to manage an increasingly mobile and dispersed workforce. The market could be north of $20B when including the complete mobile workforce

Kennedy says that what moved the needle for investors to go for the Series C was the prevailing macro trends for an increasingly mobile workforce requiring a single management platform, plus great execution.

Ravi Viswanathan, general partner at NEA says “Global mobility management is the next frontier for HR tech. Effectively deploying talent in the right place at the right time yields the highest competitive advantages for organizations. And Move Guides has developed the first cloud-based software platform to power the mobile workforce.”

Move Guides expanded its leadership team earlier this year, in particular adding Jonathan Chadwick, former executive vice president and CFO/COO of VMware, as its newest board member. In March 2017, it acquired Teleport, whose products use data science and matching algorithms to help people discover their best places to live and work. This is particularly aimed at millennial and the new global mobile worker. Move Guides has offices in the Americas, EMEA and APAC.