Awardco announced a $65 million Series A Round of venture capital for its rewards and recognition app that integrates the Amazon Business for its rewards catalog. This brings its total raised to $70 million. The round was led by General Catalyst.
Biggest HR Tech Series A Ever? Um, No.
While, in its blog announcement, Awardco claimed to be the largest Series A in HR SaaS ever, WorkTech has tracked five Series A rounds worth more than $65 million since January of 2017. They also boasted a valuation of more than $900 million, just short of the $1 billion unicorn mark. While we’re not sure that the biggest funding round and valuation is the goal in and of itself, they still get rewarded and recognized as being in the top 6 in our records.
Awardco claims to have a client list of over 1,000 companies across 141 countries. They also claim over 3 million employees on the app from companies like L3Harris Technologies, Texas Roadhouse, Hertz, and Zillow received over 9 million recognitions in the past year.
Awardco is in a very crowded category led by companies like WorkHuman and Achievers. There are more companies in the rewards and recognition space to count, however. Enterprise recognition apps tend to see high adoption. Employees and leaders like to recognize and be recognized. Gamification elements like badges, leader boards, points, and visual social media-like discussion threads work. Investors love rewards platforms, another marketplace model where everything from plaques and awards to actual goods and services can be sent to employees at a mark-up. Incorporating the Amazon Business platform as its catalog is a very smart move for Awardco, but doesn’t seem like one that’s defensible for very long.
$13.7 billion was invested globally in work tech through Q3 2021 across 299 deals. WorkTech Market Insiders can access insights and analysis of all of the deals in our Q3 report with a free membership.
