The North East Development Capital Fund (NEDCF) has co-led a GBP1.75 million funding round for Newcastle-based Hive HR Ltd (Hive), an employee engagement Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. The Fund, which is managed by Maven Capital Partners (Maven), has invested GBP500,000, alongside GBP1 million of funding from Maven’s VCTs and GBP250,000 from existing shareholders.
Since the NEDCF’s original investment in Hive HR in April 2019 the business has enjoyed strong growth, doubling revenue in the past 12 months, and has continued to add to its impressive client base, which includes River Island, Hermes, Travelodge, Tarmac, and Northumbria Police. Today’s funding will assist the business on its next phase of growth, building out its research and product development function, and investing its sales and marketing activities to grow its customer reach.
Hive (HR) is a cloud-based employee feedback platform and people science consultancy, providing organisations with a modern and measurable approach to employee surveying and employee engagement. Business leaders, HR teams and managers use Hive to regularly gather feedback from employees on all aspects of their work experience; and use real-time workforce insights to improve employee experience, manage organisational change and boost business performance.
The business has a strong management team led by CEO, John Ryder, who has over 15 years’ experience in digital marketing and the technology sector, John was previously Head of Innovation at leading North East eCommerce firm Visualsoft.
The global SaaS and HR Tech market is expanding rapidly with annual double digit growth fuelled by organisations demanding more cost effective and flexible cloud-based solutions. Over 28 per cent of global HR enterprise applications are now being delivered on a SaaS platform and is forecasted to increase significantly to 86% by 2022.
David Nixon, Investment Manager at Maven, says: “As the importance of attracting, motivating and retaining employees becomes paramount in today’s competitive environment, Hive have developed a leading proposition through its attractive, user friendly, real-time employee engagement platform that helps drive productivity and efficiency gains for its clients. We are delighted to continue our support for John and Hive by leading the latest funding round which will enable this strong team to embark on several exciting developments for the business as it continues its fantastic growth story.”
John Ryder, Founder and CEO of Hive HR, says: “The success of this investment round is a massive vote of confidence in our future and gives us an even stronger foundation to keep growing as a business. Maven has been a huge support to Hive and there’s absolutely no doubt that we’ll be using our investment wisely to develop our product and our people—bringing onboard new talent across the business, with a key focus in Product and Engineering departments, while also training and elevating our current team members. I’ve personally never worked with such a talented, passionate bunch of people and we’re all really proud of what we’ve achieved together so far.”
