Highlights:

  • Extra funds in the round were secured from Emerge Education, Picus Capital, and other cherub investors.
  • Zavvy helps companies automate employee experiences that boost performance and advance talent retention.

Zavvy, a German-based start-up, launched its take on modern employee enablement and publicized a USD 4 million funding round led by La Famiglia VC. Employee enablement platform offers onboarding and training tools to new employees.

Additional funds in this round of funding were secured from Emerge Education, Picus Capital, and other cherub investors, including Michael Wax (co-founder and CEO of Forto), Renaud Visage (co-founder of Eventbrite and Venture Partner at Point Nine), and Hanno Renner (co-founder and CEO of Personio).

Zavvy helps companies easily automate employee experiences that boost performance and advance talent retention with solutions such as connecting employees, onboarding, and continuous development in hybrid setups.

Zavvy was formed in 2021 by Mehmet Yilmaz and Joshua Cornelius (previously co-founded Freeletics). The employee enablement platform utilizes existing individuals’ information to allow employees in the flow of work. This creates a new experience layer between the HRIS and communication platforms, such as Microsoft Teams and Slack.

Zavvy’s no-code workflow developer reduces manual work for HR and managers, enables firms to tailor experiences to their unique requirements, and effortlessly integrates with their present Software as a Service (SaaS) tool stack. Once the setup is done right, there is no disturbance during work as it is wholly automated and quickly scales alongside a company.

Zavvy is targeting mid-sized, modern organizations and has onboarded dozens of consumers since its soft launch. With the new capital, the company will invest more in product development and develop its consumer base. To expand its offering, the employee enablement platform will concentrate on listening and training solutions in early 2022.

Experts’ View

Joshua Cornelius and Mehmet Yilmaz, Co-Founders of Zavvy, said, “Career development is essential for why people join and stay at a company, especially for Gen Y and Z. If you’re not enabling your team to develop, it’s just a matter of time until they leave. At Freeletics, we learned about the innate desire of people to grow and how challenging it is to support that. The same is true for professional development, which requires solutions that are easy to use, social, and embedded into the flow of work. An engaging and motivating experience is a must. In contrast, most established solutions are painful to use and insufficient, focusing on managing people’s data, processes or content.”

Judith Dada, General Partner at La Famiglia VC, said, “As companies increasingly become a commodity in the eyes of strong talent, we believe they need to rethink their entire employee experience to stay competitive. Zavvy helps businesses understand and manage the growth path of their employees – starting from onboarding all the way to development cycles. Joshua and Mehmet have a track record of excellence when it comes to understanding how to use technology to enable personal growth – this is a topic they’re deeply passionate about. They have the ability to build the right team and scale Zavvy to success.”

Barbara Imm, Head of HR Head at ROADSURFER GMBH, said, “The first days in a company are overwhelming for any new employee. It’s important to give new team members a warm and supportive onboarding experience. At the same time, we’re growing rapidly and need a reliable and scalable onboarding solution for both remote and in-office across 50 locations in twelve countries. Zavvy gives us exactly that. Our manual work is drastically reduced, and new team members rate their onboarding experience highly. We’re looking forward to rolling out company-wide development plans with Zavvy later this year. In combination with onboarding, it will allow us to offer our team continuous growth from day one.”