Employee Enablement Platform Zavvy Launches With $4 Million in Seed Funding

• Round Led by la Famiglia VC, Startup Helps Growing Companies Onboard and Develop Their Employees

Zavvy, the employee enablement platform, announces its launch and $4 million in seed funding led by La Famiglia VC, a fund backed by entrepreneurs investing in seed-stage companies. Additional investment in the round was secured from Emerge Education, Picus Capital, and a number of angel investors, including Renaud Visage (co-founder of Eventbrite and Venture Partner at Point Nine), Hanno Renner (co-founder and CEO of Personio), and Michael Wax (co-founder and CEO of Forto). Zavvy helps growing companies easily automate employee experiences that drive performance and increase talent retention with solutions like onboarding, continuous development, and connecting employees in hybrid setups.

Zavvy was debuted in 2021 by Joshua Cornelius and Mehmet Yilmaz. They are passionate about personal and professional development and previously co-founded Freeletics, one of Europe’s most successful health and fitness apps with more than 53 million users (acquired by FitLab in 2018).

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“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,” said Joshua Cornelius and Mehmet Yilmaz, co-founders of Zavvy.

“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,” said Judith Dada, General Partner at La Famiglia VC.

Zavvy makes use of existing people data to enable employees in the flow of work. It thereby creates a new experience layer between the HRIS and communication platforms, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. Zavvy’s no-code workflow builder minimizes manual work for HR and managers, allows companies to tailor experiences to their unique needs, and seamlessly integrates with their existing SaaS tool stack. Once set up, workflows run fully automated and effortlessly scale alongside a company.

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“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,” said Barbara Imm, Head of HR at roadsurfer.

Zavvy is targeting modern, mid-sized companies and has signed on dozens of customers since its soft launch. With the new capital, it will invest heavily in product development and growing its customer base. To expand its offering, the company will focus on listening and training solutions in early 2022.

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