Bullying, harassment and other misconduct are still commonplace at work.
Vault wants to bring workplace misconduct reporting into the 21st century.
Vault aims to modernize the reporting of misconduct in the workplace.
To this end, it has raised $8.2m in a Series A, which will allow it to further develop its solutions and algorithms.
Unfortunately, is clear that discrimination is still rife in the workplace. For instance, research by SHRM found that 14% of US workers have been mistreated in the workplace in the past year. This rose to 19% over the past five years.
Therefore, there remains a need for employees to be able to report misconduct – whether it is bullying, harassment, racism, or bribery and corruption – in a safe, supportive and anonymous way.
Historically this has been done through hotlines, but London-based startup Vault Platform wants to bring workplace misconduct reporting into the 21st century with the help of its SaaS platform.
Digitalized misconduct reporting and employer compliance have become even more important with the shift to remote working, which is looking set to continue in the future for many.
Only three years after founding and two years since a $4.2 million Seed round, Vault has closed a $8.2 million Series A. The investment was led by Google’s AI fund Gradient Ventures; Illuminate Financial, Kindred Capital, and Angular Ventures also participated in the round.
The TrustTech startup provides an end-to-end solution to companies seeking to be more ethical and inclusive that helps to facilitate secure communication and collaboration between teams, and therefore quicker and better resolution of any misconduct issues.
Companies like Airbnb, Ovo Energy, and Matthew Clark currently use the Vault platform for their workplace compliance.
Neta Meidav, Vault’s co-founder and CEO, explained: “Major breaches and ethical failures that go unreported can cost companies a fortune and turn into crises.
“Until now, enterprises could only rely on passive reporting mechanisms. Vault Platform is transformational, by empowering employees to surface the problems they experience, connecting the dots on repeated patterns and offering our customers an unparalleled risk detection capability.”
Gradient Ventures founder and managing partner Anna Patterson added: “Vault Platform tackles an important space with an innovative and timely solution.
“Vault Platform’s application provides organizations with a data-driven approach to tackling challenges like occupational fraud, bribery or corruption incidents, safety failures and misconduct.
“Given their impressive team, technology, and customer traction, they are poised to improve the modern workplace.”
Vault plans to use the funding to continue to develop and expand its features – which include an employee app, a resolution hub and a ‘GoTogether’ escrow tool – with the help of AI.
“We’re just beginning to scratch the surface of AI’s potential in misconduct reporting through our unique GoTogether technology and we have so much more to come,” continued Meidav.
She also told TechCrunch: “The capacity we’re currently building and increasing — building upon what we already have with GoTogether — is the ability to connect on these repeated events and be able to connect and understand and read the human input. And connect the dots when repeated events are happening — alerting companies’ boards that there is a certain ‘hot pocket’ that they need to go and investigate.
“That would save companies from great risk, great cost, and essentially could prevent huge loss.
“Not only financial but reputational, sometimes it’s even loss to human lives… That’s where we’re getting to and what we’re aiming to achieve.”
In addition, Vault plans to use this funding to grow its team, which is located between offices in New York, London, and Tel Aviv.
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Chief Reporter
Allie is an award-winning business journalist and can be reached at alexandra@unleash.ai.
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