Paycor raised $270 million in private equity for its HR and payroll suite focused on small and medium-sized businesses. Paycor raised private equity in 2018 for an undisclosed amount. Apax Partners led the recent round as well as the investment in 2018.
Paycor takes a strict platform approach to HR software. You’ll find no ecosystem here. Partners are limited to insurance brokers, banking and financial advisors, and account partners. Focused on small employers (<50 employees is where we bump into them), they have benefited as other larger HCM suites have moved to the middle market.
Payroll is an HR technology category that investors like. It’s one of the few “must have” solutions for employers. The SMB segment is also the largest segment in both number of firms and lives under management. Firms that can focus and execute and scale product and service have a significant market opportunity, even as the payroll and HCM categories for the SMB continue to see more saturation.
The payroll category saw $206 million of the $5 billion invested globally in HR technology during 2020. Details on the investments by category are in our latest full report.