Employment Hero, an Australia-based human resources (HR) startup, has raised A$3m ($2.2m) from a consortium including corporate venturing unit AMP New Ventures to launch its cloud-based employee management platform in the UK by the end of the year.
The round was led by venture capital firm OneVentures.
Instead of focusing on a subscription model, the Employment Hero (EH) platform is free for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with the startup instead earning revenue from its marketplace, which provides deals for health insurance, phone plans and gym memberships.
Alfred Lo, head of AMP New Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the eponymous financial services firm, said: “As Australia’s largest pension, wealth management and retail life insurer, we will supercharge Employment Hero’s ability to reach the many SMEs that are underserved in this space.
“We believe there is an opportunity to improve support for these businesses that need to administer HR-related functions such as payroll and superannuation pension contributions. Providing support such as this is important for AMP’s SME customers, which are a core part of our corporate superannuation pension business.
“We are still working through the many ways we’ll be able to help EH – I think platforms like EH offer new but highly relevant and contextual channels for the real-time delivery of financial and non-financial products and services.”