Indianapolis – October 10, 2019 – Emplify, a data-driven employee engagement improvement company, today announced a $15 million investment led by growth equity investor Edison Partners. The company plans to reinvest the funds back into its core product and service innovation and into expanding its sales and marketing teams to drive future growth. Prior investors, including Allos Ventures, Cultivation Capital, Mark Hill, Bob Davoli from Gutbrain Ventures and 4G Ventures managing director Bill Godfrey, also participated in the round.
“Emplify is scientifically tackling the most pertinent issue employers face today: building a culture that attracts, engages and retains talent,” said Ryan Ziegler, general partner at Edison Partners. “Defined business outcomes are tied to measurable business improvements that Emplify’s customers experience in less than 12 months speak for themselves. Santiago Jaramillo and his team have built a superior solution for measuring and continuously improving employee engagement, and we look forward to helping Emplify advance its mission.”
In addition to the capital raise, Emplify has hired enterprise sales veteran George Tate as SVP of Sales to propel the company’s growth. As former Vice President of Sales at Paylocity, Tate was instrumental in taking the company from a $17M private company to an industry-leading public company with a $5.5B market cap. In his 12 years at Paylocity, he expanded the sales team from five to more than 270 sales representatives and grew revenue to $105M.
Since its founding, Emplify has grown year-over-year revenue by more than 275 percent on average and has collected more than 14 million unique employee data points. The company has found that, within the first year of working with Emplify, customers see employee engagement scores increase with each consecutive quarter, and employee turnover decreases by as much as 50 percent. Many also report saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in labor costs and increasing profit as a result of using Emplify to improve employee engagement with greater clarity and confidence.
“So many big players in the HR tech space assume that simply adding survey functionality ‘checks the box’ on effective employee feedback,” said Santiago Jaramillo, Emplify CEO and author of Amazon bestseller Agile Engagement. “The reality is that bad survey experiences have caused a lot of damage to organizations. Edison’s growth investment, bringing on George Tate as SVP of Sales and Emplify’s customer results confirm our hypothesis: business and people leaders are hungry for a way to collect, analyze and implement employee feedback that actually works to measurably improve employee engagement and performance.”
Emplify is the only employee engagement company that combines software with human data analysis and expert coaching. The solution uses employee surveys to score how an employer performs across 17 employee engagement drivers such as autonomy, feedback and psychological safety. There are a number of ways the employer can segment the data, the most common including by department, manager, generation, gender and role. An Employee Engagement Strategist—a role akin to a data analyst and executive coach hybrid—helps business managers analyze survey results and build an action plan to measurably improve engagement.
“Measuring our culture has led to initiatives that are directly improving our team members’ perception of who we are,” said Rick Lombardo, executive director of corporate development at Millwood Inc, an Emplify customer. “As a result, our turnover has dropped by 24 percent. By stabilizing our workforce, we’ve decreased OSHA recordable injuries by 20 percent and increased profit by 24 percent year-over-year.”
Organizational psychologists and behavioral scientists from three universities have validated Emplify’s engagement model and survey methodology. Emplify enlisted statisticians like Dr. Joshua Hammonds, professor at Rollins College, to confirm the validity and reliability of the survey instrument.
“In my statistical analysis of Emplify’s survey methodology, I found strong reliability and consistency in its ability to predict employee engagement in the workplace,” said Dr. Hammonds.
Leading brands like Salesloft, Adaugeo Healthcare Solutions, and Ruoff Home Mortgage trust Emplify to improve business results through employee engagement.
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About Emplify
Emplify’s data-driven employee engagement improvement solution helps executives and HR leaders make better people decisions and improve business results. Informed by science and psychometrics, Emplify is the first to fuse a software platform, agile process, and expert human strategists into a data-proven employee engagement system — focused on achieving iterative business transformation through simple, actionable, and timely culture measurement and coaching. Emplify is trusted by leaders at top companies like Salesloft, Adaugeo Healthcare Solutions, and Ruoff Home Mortgage. Emplify was co-founded in 2015 by Santiago Jaramillo, bestselling author of Agile Engagement, and is backed by Edison Partners, Allos Ventures and Cultivation Capital. Emplify is based in Indianapolis, Ind., and is on a mission to help all people achieve their true potential at work.
About Edison Partners
For more than 30 years, Edison Partners has been helping CEOs and their executive teams grow and scale successful companies. The firm’s investment team brings extensive investing and operating experience to each investment. Through a unique combination of growth capital and the Edison Edge platform, consisting of operating centers of excellence, the Edison Director Network, and executive education programs, Edison employs a truly integrated approach to accelerating growth and creating value for businesses. A team of experts in enterprise software, financial technology, and healthcare IT sectors, Edison targets high-growth companies with $5 to $25 million in revenue; investments also include buyouts, recapitalizations, spinouts and secondary stock purchases.
Edison’s active portfolio has created aggregated market value exceeding $10 billion. Edison Partners is based in Princeton, NJ and manages more than $1.4 billion in assets throughout the eastern United States.
