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Brazilian HRTech Gupy just raised $ 93 million in what is not only the largest round in the company’s history, but also the biggest check for a female-founded startup in Latin America.
The round was led by SoftBank and venture capital firm Riverwood, and joined by Endeavor Catalyst, as well as existing investors Oria Capital and Maya Capital. Since its inception in 2015, Gupy has raised nearly $100 million.
The recent capital injection will support the company’s plan to offer a full product suite for human resources functions. “This is a department that needs consolidation. Customers love that. It is much easier to have a single supplier”, says Mariana Dias, president and co-founder at Gupy.
HR departments in Brazil were barely digitized until the pandemic and had to rush to adopt tools that could help them recruit, train and retain employees remotely. Since these tools are offered by disparate vendors, Gupy’s strategy to unify everything in a single platform makes sense.
Gupy was launched as a recruitment tool and expanded to the admissions segment in 2020. In the following year, the company started to offer employee training, after acquiring fellow HRTech Niduu. According to Dias, the growth strategy foresees new acquisitions and further advances around product development, as well as partnering with other products and services when applicable.
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As well as helping corporate clients recruit, welcome and train new employees, Gupy wants to get closer to the final customer – the jobseeker. “Not many people go through the recruitment process because most of them are not trained to answer to the company’s needs. We want to increase their chance of success”, says Dias.
Through its Job Portal platform, Gupy posts 20,000 job vacancies per month. Its database has 22 million users and in the last month alone, there were 6 million new registrations.
Founded by Dias and her brother Guilherme Dias, alongside Bruna Guimarães and Robson Ventura, Gupy has 1,500 customers such as drinks conglomerate Ambev, payments firm Cielo, retailers GPA, Renner and telco giant Vivo. The company has been doubling in size year-over-year and intends to maintain this pace in 2022. “Growth generates a virtuous cycle. The more clients we have, the more opportunities we create”, Dias points out. The plan is to focus on Brazil, even though Gupy has clients across 10 countries.
Due to the low use of technological tools in HR, Gupy’s growth will mostly come from offering its products to new companies, rather than “stealing” market share from other suppliers – such as Oracle, SAP and Brazil-based LG.
Clearly, the current customer base will also play an important role in this process. Gupy has a net dollar retention of 120%. This means that if the company doesn’t make any new sales outside of its current base, it still grows at a 20% rate. Customer retention is significantly below the software-as- a-service market – at 1% versus 5%. “Investment funds have told us that we are the fastest growing SaaS company in Brazil. We think we are among the top three”, says Dias. Gupy also plans to grow its internal headcount from 500 to 700 employees.
(translation by Gabriela Del Carmen, editing by Angelica Mari)
