Laszlo Bock still remembers his first day at Google back in 2006, when the management team sat down to review candidates who were up for a job.
“We rejected somebody because one of my colleagues said they had a ‘stupid major,’ ” Bock recalls, who led human resources, or “people operations” as Google called it, from 2006 to 2016. “And this was somebody, by the way, who was at Stanford with great grades. I was just appalled at the bias.”
That distrust of gut-based talent decisions helped inspire Bock to launch Humu with former Google colleagues Wayne Crosby and Jessie Wisdom in 2017. Bock is CEO of the company, which uses AI technology and the “nudge” theory introduced by economist Richard Thaler and Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein to help organizations keep employees engaged and effective in their jobs. On Tuesday, Humu announced a $60 million Series C round led by the venture capital firm TCV, bringing its total funding to $110 million.
Humu’s raise may not be eye-popping in an HR tech sector that attracted $12.3 billion in venture capital deals last year, according to PitchBook, but the investment—and Humu’s model—speaks to the growing need for technology that helps with what a recent KPMG report described as “difficulties associated with managing remote or hybrid workforces.”
As TCV partner David Eichler says, “people are realizing the cost of maintaining and managing your employee force is non-trivial and really critical.”
Humu works something like a virtual personal coach, using artificial intelligence to mine employee surveys and other data inputs to identify which behavioral changes could help workers and employers reach their goals. It then sends workers tailored “nudges” which appear in email, Slack or Microsoft Teams and are aimed at changing behaviors, often with explanations or links to research about why these matter. As people say they’ve improved—and the people around them do, too—machine learning helps the system move on to additional goals.
“The thing that got me, as a CHRO, is that [Humu’s customers said] they saw behavioral change. Every single customer cited that,” says Jessica Neal, a former talent chief at Netflix who is now a TCV venture partner and will join Humu’s board. Many platforms offer record-keeping or worker surveys, she says, but “the one thing that you don’t have in your suite is a platform to help you figure out what to do.”
Humu’s “nudges” send reminders for things like giving co-workers credit in meetings, checking in on other teams’ project deadlines or getting quiet teammates to speak up. Nudging multiple people on similar issues helps drive change, Bock says: A manager might get a reminder before a meeting to urge quiet workers to say something; at the same time, coworkers get suggestions to seek colleagues’ input.
Bock says Humu won’t disclose revenues or an overall valuation. But he says the company works with two of the top three companies in several major industries, which include pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, technology and chemicals. Its client list has grown by about six times in the last two years, he says, and includes Virgin Atlantic, Vodafone and Fidelity Investments.
The new capital raise will be used, Bock says, to adapt Humu's platform to work better for “deskless” employees, such as front-line retail workers and delivery drivers. The company will also invest in creating more tools for managers, such as automating meeting invites and other routine tasks, allowing more control over which nudges are sent and notifying them when teams have low morale.
“The challenge with a lot of H.R. issues and people challenges inside companies is every single person has their own intuition about what the right answer is,” says Bock. “Unless you actually run the experiments and work in the field, whose opinion is more valid than anyone else’s?”
That Bock finds himself an H.R. tech entrepreneur amid boom times for the sector is fitting for someone who’s had a knack for working at companies that have shaped the business world’s approach to talent management in recent decades. Bock worked as a consultant at McKinsey during the late dot-com boom; in the mid-2000s, he worked in H.R. at General Electric when it was still considered a leadership “academy” vaunted for its management succession machine.
Then Google came calling, and he helped scale it from post-IPO tech darling to industry colossus over the next decade, building a culture fueled by free lunches and onsite dry cleaning that other companies tried to mimic. He’s also known in H.R. circles for building Google’s PhD-stocked “people analytics” team and chronicling their work in a 2015 bestseller.
But the road to that pedigree wasn’t a straight one, or one Bock thinks should open doors. For Bock, whose parents fled communist Romania when he was two, his first post-college years included an acting stint (he briefly appeared as a lifeguard on “Baywatch”) and working for a construction materials manufacturer, where a mentor taught him how to tie dress shoes for the first time. At Yale, a McKinsey consultant said his resume wasn't “distinctive enough,” though he later got a job.
Bock interviewed with nearly 20 people at Google and initially declined the job he was up for; he only got the top role after writing a three-page memo to Google’s founders about the post-IPO issues he thought they would face.
Few former big company CHROs lead tech startups—H.R. experts point to former Goldman Sachs H.R. chief Dane Holmes, who cofounded DEI platform Eskalera, as another. Bock sometimes talks like one, too, saying a consumer version is on Humu’s “roadmap” over time: “Eventually what we want to do is not just make work better for people today, but really transform people's careers and lives over time.”
Some who know Bock say such lofty talk is genuine. Steve Patscot, who leads the H.R. practice at executive search firm Spencer Stuart and worked at GE the same time as Bock, says he would sometimes call Bock for a candidate reference. “He said something to me I’ll never forget. ‘I am always happy to give you a reference on anybody who I’ve ever worked with, I just need you to do me a favor,’ ” Patscot recalls Bock saying. “ ‘I believe I hired great people, and I just need you to make sure the job you’re putting them in really matters.’ ”
Still, some analysts say Humu faces an increasingly crowded competitive landscape, with tech giants like Microsoft and Workday moving into the space. Helen Poitevin, an analyst at Gartner, says she’s struggled to be able to speak with customers who are using Humu’s product, and that there’s a lot of “buzz” about AI and nudges that she doesn’t yet see leading to customer demand.
Meanwhile, an obstacle for any company trying to use AI to coach employees, says Forrester analyst Betsy Summers, is how much data clients are able or willing to put into their systems to make such software more valuable. She says Humu has a “cool value proposition,” but cited a survey where H.R. leaders said they have less confidence in their own internal AI capabilities than anything else.
Bock and Crosby, one of Humu’s cofounders, say the company does more than just survey employees of its mostly large enterprise customers about engagement, and that its customized, science-backed nudges are different from off-the-shelf notifications. “What we really are is a behavioral change platform,” Crosby says.
Expedia Group chief people officer Arch Singh wrote in an email to Forbes that the travel company has used Humu since 2020, “a time when everyone was adjusting to remote work and coping with uncertainty.” It’s used Humu to gather feedback on employees’ experience during the pandemic and send tailored nudges a couple times per month, saying it has seen higher retention rates among those who use it.
For Bock, the pandemic has reinforced how much employers must treat their people better. And even if there’s some irony in managers needing tech to remember something like a work anniversary, “we as human beings have a really hard time doing that because we're fallible and flawed,” Bock says. “There’s actually a moment for the right kind of humane technology to transform that, to just give us that little bit of help so we know how to make time and space for other people.”
