GoCo Secures $7M Series A To Streamline HR And Benefits

GoCo, a Houston-based human resources (HR) and benefits platform focused on the SMB market, has raised $7 million in a Series A round led by ATX Seed Ventures.

UpCurve, a wholly owned subsidiary of New Media Investment Group, also participated in the funding as a strategic investor. The round brings the company’s total funding to $12.5 million. Other backers include Salesforce Ventures and GIS Strategic Ventures, the venture arm of Guardian Life Insurance.

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GoCo was founded in 2015 by CEO Nir Leibovich, Chief Technology Officer Jason Wang and Chief Product Officer Michael Gugel, a trio that has seen two exits as a team in the past eight years. Leibovich co-founded Arpeggi, a startup that developed consumer DNA testing, which was acquired by Gene by Gene in 2013. He also co-founded MarketZero, an online tracker of poker player career stats, which was sold to Zynga in 2011.

The concept for GoCo was born out of the trio trying to address a pain point while at Arpeggi.

“One day, I walked over to my HR admin’s office and noticed she was buried behind piles of paperwork,” Leibovich told Crunchbase News. “My sales and marketing teams had systems in place to help them be more efficient but poor Josie was still stuck in the old way of doing things. So I started looking for solutions. We tried a couple of options but none really worked. So like any entrepreneur, I decided to scratch my own itch, and talked to my co-founders about starting GoCo and bringing that kind of solution to the market.”

Leibovich describes GoCo as the “fusion” of modern, paperless HR functions such as employee onboarding, cloud-storage document management, electronic signature workflows, time-off tracking, and HR data reporting. It also provides benefits enrollment and management, payroll sync and compliance enablement. 

Competitors in the space include Zenefits, Gusto, and Namely, all of which have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital.

GoGo says it plans to use the new money in part to hire “across all departments,” with the aim of quadrupling its headcount to about 100 this year. It also aims to expand its platform and offerings, while acquiring more customers. UpCurve, for example, will be selling GoCo through its nationwide distribution network.

So far, customer growth has increased steadily with the number of GoCo users having climbed 10-fold over the past two years, according to Leibovich. The company currently has 6,200 customers, including retail and gym franchises, school districts, tech companies, healthcare organizations and real estate brokerages. Combined, nearly 100,000 employees are using its platform, he added. The company also surpassed $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in late 2017, Leibovich told Crunchbase News.

 Chris Shonk, managing partner of Austin-based ATX Seed Ventures, said his firm doubled down on its investment in GoCo because it believes the company “is positioned to become the platform of choice for HR professionals to break out of the chains of outdated and complex HR duties.”

“It empowers them to spend more time on their employees and higher value tasks,” he added.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias