Building a culture of engagement is of critical importance in today’s competitive landscape for the workforce. Employees must be engaged and given growth opportunities in order for an organization to scale to meet its strategic and operational goals. Increasingly, organizations are dedicating resources to understand employee capabilities, motivation, and how these align with the company’s goals long-term and short. Knoetic is a platform built for Chief People Officers by Chief People Officers. The platform is a workforce analytics platform that also has its own flourishing professional community component, CPOHQ, that connects thousands of Chief People Officers to support one another and provide best practices. The analytics side allows CPOs to take an unprecedented data-driven approach to their roles by integrating data from 60+ HR systems to provide an unprecedented look into a company’s HR-related metrics like DEI, performance, compensation, retention, attrition, etc. Since 2020, the company has grown ARR by 5x, the community by 20x, and tripled the size of the team.
AlleyWatch caught up with Knoetic Founder and CEO Joseph Quan to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, which brings the total funding raised to $54M, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We raised a $36M Series B, led by EQT Ventures. I’m very excited to have Ali Mitchell @EQT as our partner, who will also join our Board of Directors. Menlo Ventures (JP Sanday) also joined as a new investor, and existing investor Accel (Vas Natarajan), our Series A lead, doubled down in the round.
They join a syndicate of 100+ angel investors, including Adam Grant, Pamela Thomas Graham, Gokul Rajaram, and CPOs from Bill.com, Front, Zapier, Box, Calendly, ScaleAI, Calm, and more
We’ve now raised over $50M total across Series A and B!
Tell us about the product or service that Knoetic offers.
Knoetic’s vision is to become the most powerful platform ever built for Chief People Officers. In the last decade, there have been two new needs for CPOs: Become more quantitative and data-driven and become “strategic.”
We achieved that by building two products, unified in the same platform:
(1) People analytics tool to give CPOs quantitative insights on attrition, diversity, headcount growth, etc. at their fingertips. Knoetic integrates with 60+ HR systems to give leaders a single source of truth to run comprehensive people analytics, saving them 100s of hours of wrangling people data.
(2) CPO community, called CPOHQ, to equip CPOs with the strategy, plan, benchmarks, and playbooks of thousands of peers to tackle today’s most pressing people/workforce challenges
What inspired the start of Knoetic?
Knoetic was built right when the pandemic hit (March 2020) in response to an enormous paradigm shift: the rise of the Chief People Officer and the strategic People (HR) function.
In the last decade, CPOs have seen massive expansion of their responsibilities, work, and influence – particularly in the last two years. 2020 and all its challenges woke CEOs and boards up to how critical it is to have a strategic People function.
Knoetic empowers Chief People Officers with quantitative and qualitative insights to navigate these difficult hurdles. Recent discussions inside Knoetic/CPOHQ have touched on “Quiet Quitting,” The Great Resignation, navigating a downturn, Roe v. Wade, hiring freezes, COVID protocols, employee engagement, and DEI metrics.
How is Knoetic different?
In the last decade, CPOs have seen massive expansion of their responsibilities, work, and influence – particularly in the last two years. 2020 and all its challenges woke CEOs and boards up to how critical it is to have a strategic People function.
Knoetic empowers Chief People Officers with quantitative and qualitative insights to navigate these difficult hurdles. Recent discussions inside Knoetic/CPOHQ have touched on “Quiet Quitting,” The Great Resignation, navigating a downturn, Roe v. Wade, hiring freezes, COVID protocols, employee engagement, and DEI metrics.
What market does Knoetic target and how big is it?
In the short run, we’re focused on serving Chief People Officers and their teams, which only represents a tiny market only for us. We’ll expand from there.
Longer run, we’re targeting a $30B market for what we call “people decisions and analytics.”
What’s your business model?
Chief People Officers who are accepted into CPOHQ receive free access to all of its resources – including a forum, benchmarks, playbooks, meetups, roundtables and more.
Once CPOs are ready for people analytics, they purchase our SaaS product. We price based on company size.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown??
The broader tech slowdown has only strengthened the need for solutions to support a strategic HR function.
Teams are being tasked to do more with fewer resources. Knoetic serves as an extension of these teams during a time they need it most by eliminating the need for manually aggregated reports, shaving hours off each week for teams to quickly pull and disseminate insights that are critical to the success of their people function.
What was the funding process like?
Fortunately, we were able to raise in a two-week sprint. Our strong market traction, customer loyalty, and brand recognition all contributed to the quick process.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Evangelizing the vision of building 2 really complex products: a community AND a data platform at the same time.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
We are a leading example of community-led growth, and run the largest executive network of 2,000+ Chief People Officers from the most strategic companies. Our community serves as a deep moat, and immediately stands out as a differentiator.
We’re also in a hot space at the perfect time to support the rise of the strategic, data-driven people function.
In many ways, the rise of the CPO mirrors the previous rise of the CRO and CMO in the last decade. The HR function is still 5-10 years behind sales, marketing, and customer tech in its analytical capabilities. HR software still isn’t great, and many are still living in manual spreadsheets for data analysis.
Knoetic is helping to usher in the next generation of strategic, data-driven CPOs.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We have three specific goals with this funding.
The first is to ship a suite of new people analytics features for Chief People Officers and their teams. This includes features like Custom Dashboards to empower people teams, functional leaders, and frontline managers to build their own narratives and stories with people data.
The second is to supercharge our CPO community. We’ll roll out intimate, IRL executive-only programming, and enhanced benchmarking and reporting to deliver members actionable, high value reports.
The third is to hire top-notch talent. Getting the right people (“Knoeticons”) means everything to us – we have an incredibly high bar for talent, and have grown our headcount by 3X YoY. Since our last round, we’ve added leaders from top tech companies like Square, Drift, Amazon, Handshake, Amplitude, and more. We’re continuing to aggressively hire in our Product, Engineering, and GTM teams
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Watch your burn multiple carefully, do monthly finance checkins/calibrations, manage cash and/or cut until you have 15+ months in the runway in the bank. It’s all about survival.
Watch your burn multiple carefully, do monthly finance checkins/calibrations, manage cash and/or cut until you have 15+ months in the runway in the bank. It’s all about survival.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
In the near term, we’re focused on our “Act 1” – supporting CPOs and their teams. We’ll deliver the best platform for CPOs, ever. Then, we’ll pursue “Act 2!”
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
Recently went to Masa, it’s as good as they say.
