Nigeria’s SeamlessHR Raises $10m In Series A Round

The cloud computing technology in Africa has in recent times has an increase in fortunes, with connectivity and bandwidth opportunities as result having a spike. It was projected that the cloud computing industry on the African continent and the Middle East will grow from $14.2 billion it had in 2021 to $31.4 billion in 2026.

Nigeria-based firm, SeamlessHR is looking to leverage on Africa’s abundant human capital, the continent’s greatest asset to help businesses tune in with its cloud-based human resources (HR) and payroll software. It is on the aegis of this that the company raised $10 million in Series A funding for its next phase of growth and regional expansion.

The round was led by pan-African venture capital firm TLcom Capital, with new investors like Capria Ventures and existing investors Lateral Frontier Ventures, Enza Capital and Ingressive Capital participating.

The cloud-based, end-to-end HR software from SeamlessHR is programmed to help businesses manage and streamline their entire human resource processes and workflow, with its product suite including an HR management system, performance and competency management, HR analytics, leave management, payroll management and recruitment management.

The company started from iterations of Insidify, an aggregator site for job seekers and a review site for companies, after four years metamorphosed to SeamlessHR in 2018.

The CEO and founder of SeamlessHR, Emmanuel Okeleji went memory lane in a chat with TechCrunch, in his words:

 “The natural client for our job sites was the HR,” CEO Okeleji told TechCrunch on a call. “So we thought, ‘how can we help HR to become more productive and successful so that they can run a better, more profitable company and hire more people in the process?”

Okeleji added that the change from Insidify to SeamlessHR was predicated on the fact that Insidify wasn’t profitable and lacked the flexibility to scale across Africa, but noted that with SeamlessHR, both goals could be accomplished and according to him, his projection was justified as after a year SeamlessHR’s MVP was launched, revenues picked up and was 10 times more than Insidify’s. 

The company had initially adopted couple of smaller companies to build its reputation but along the line had to focus on bigger clients and signed up a bank as its first main enterprise customer. The company while affirming that its enterprise-grade solution caters to various companies, noted that they range from businesses with 100 employees or fewer to large enterprises with more than 10,000 employees; and from multinationals and banks such as PwC, AXA and Sterling Bank to startups and investment firms like Flutterwave and TGI Group.

Okeleji said over 100,000 employees from these organizations use SeamlessHR monthly, with the company having the largest aggregation of medium-to-very large companies in Africa.

The SeamlessHR brand can now boast of rich human resource, with an efficient payroll data after handling salaries for several hundreds of companies.

“In Africa, the innovation that allows people to access credit from their jobs doesn’t happen. And an HR payroll software is well-positioned to lead that innovation because we use finance, technology and HR to help people convert their employment into collateral to access safe credit,” stated the CEO, who believes the company’s cash advances will appeal more to employees than “predatory” loans offered by some lending companies.