VC giant Andreessen Horowitz backs Australian HR tech startup Pyn

Australian HR tech startup Pyn has nabbed $8 million in a round led by notable US VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.

This is the firm’s first investment in Australia. The Silicon Valley VC has invested in well known tech companies including Facebook, Airbnb, Pinterest, and Lyft.

Pyn also received funds from Atlassian co-founder and co-chief Scott Farquhar and BambooHR co-founder Ryan Sanders.

Founded in 2019 by Jon Williams, one of the co-founders of Culture Amp, and Joris Joris Luijke, former vice president at Atlassian and Squarespace, Pyn allows businesses to leverage the information they know about employees to communicate more effectively.

“We make that process ridiculously easy,” Luijke says.

Today’s news follows on from the startup’s $3.1 million Seed round in July 2020. Williams says it’s been a “busy year” for the firm.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the rapid shift to remote work “exposed a lot of weaknesses” in the way companies communicate, and some of their broader processes, Williams continues.

Indeed, many of the tech stacks that HR flew into the crisis with are no longer adequate. This tech revolution has undoubtedly been fuelled by COVID-19 and Luijke says hybrid working has accelerated growth for Pyn.

David Ulevitch, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, explained why the firm backed the startup:

“Pyn is an internal communications tool that leaders across executive and people operations teams can deploy for bespoke communications to a target group of employees, at just the right time. No more mass internal emails that employees grow to ignore. It’s personalized employee communication that can make a big impact on productivity, development, and longevity.

“However, Pyn is far more than a communications power tool that optimally disseminates information. It also treats employee communication channels as the rails upon which to orchestrate management practices across an organization.

“Pyn delivers a library of management playbooks. For instance, once an employee is designated as a new manager in the Human Resource Information System (HRIS), Pyn can initiate the onboarding processes for that new manager instead of waiting for some version of quarterly new manager training.”