HR management platform StaffAny gets US$722K seed funding, focussing on growth
StaffAny, a human resource (HR) workforce management platform based in Singapore, announces that it has raised S$1 million (US$722,000) in seed funding round led by FreakOut Holdings, Inc.
Several angel investors also participated in the funding round, including HR tech entrepreneur Kenji Niwa. It also included co-founders of Zendesk-owned live-chat software company Zopim: Lim Qing Ru, Kwok Yang Bin, and Royston Tay.
StaffAny said it plans to support its growth and expansion plans with the investment.
“FreakOut’s philosophy is to ‘give people work that requires a person’ … It means by building new technologies and providing the right solutions, we give people time to focus on being creative, the real human part of work,” said Yuzuru Honda, Founder & Global CEO of FreakOut Holdings, Inc.
StaffAny is app-based solutions that connect HR and operations in order to manage hourly workers, which typically is found in the F&B and retail sectors.
Using enterprise software that schedules staff rotation, it gives control to employees because it provides an on-site time clock, smart timesheets, easy leave application, and real-time reports.
From the management side, StaffAny said it allows managers to eliminate manual consolidation work.
StaffAny was co-founded by four alumni of the NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) Programme: Janson Seah, Jeremy Hon, Lee Kai Yi, and Eugene Ng in early 2018.
As technology evolves, manpower crunch follows suit, especially in Singapore where services such as retail and F&B remain labour intensive.
More consumers using applications such as GrabFood and Deliveroo directly affect restaurants with a greater manpower shortage during peak hours. Reshuffling the workforce is the way to deal with the problem, something that StaffAny claimed to help with while also “lower operating costs and increase productivity”.
In Singapore, there are some 150,000 businesses registered on ACRA that require hourly workforce management. According to a 2018 labour report by the Ministry of Manpower, there are over 735,000 hourly workers in the F&B and retail sectors and another 230,000 part-timers.
“We aim to get 10 per cent of Singapore F&B market share, and then expand overseas. Our long-term goal is to build the easiest workforce management tool in Southeast Asia,” said Janson Seah, co-founder StaffAny.
StaffAny has previously received grant funding totalling S$75,000 (US$54,000) from organisations including the NUS, Enterprise SG, and StartupX, a pre-accelerator programme in partnership with Temasek.
StaffAny was also e27’s TOP100 Singapore champion at Echelon Asia Summit on May 23-24.
Currently, StaffAny claimed to have 80 businesses as customers, helping them manage over 2,000 staffs every month, who are based in 130 outlets.