New partners, bigger goals, same mission
Today Sora is setting off on the next leg of our journey, with some new exciting partners and new bigger goals – all while doubling down on our core mission to empower people-focused teams to create exceptional employee experiences.
A year ago when we announced our seed funding, our goal was to bring Sora to more People teams. At that time, we had already spent a couple years working with people throughout the HR world and we were excited to have the beginnings of the tool that People teams needed.
Everywhere we looked we saw overwhelmed teams and fragmented HR stacks. Teams of people were spending hours and hours on tedious manual tasks, copying and pasting emails over and over, pinging teammates about overdue tasks, and entering and re-entering employee data from one HR tool to the next.
As HR was becoming People, the responsibilities and expectations from these teams were growing, but they weren't being equipped with the tools they needed.
There was a clear need for something that could integrate and streamline HR operations – automating tedious tasks and enabling tools to communicate with each other.
And we knew Sora could be that tool. But to do that, we knew we needed to grow. Grow the product, and grow the team.
A year later, we’ve doubled our team. We added engineers, implementation experts, and success managers. And like many of our customers, we've taken that team remote.
We've built new features our customers told us they needed. Allowing entire processes to be initiated by employees without any People team intervention. Adding automated calendar invites to workflows. And adding the ability to sync data between tools outside of Sora.
We've added more integrations with more HR tools, and we've deepened the level of Sora’s integration with the tools we already had – officially partnering with tools like Greenhouse, Lever, and ADP.
And along the way, we've 7x’d the number of companies using Sora.
Companies of all shapes and sizes use Sora – from hypergrowth startups like Superhuman to huge companies like Renesas Electronics, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of semiconductors.
In a year that saw People teams asked to do more than ever before, Sora was able to become a shared working place for remote teams making huge changes to all of their employee processes and HR operations.
We saw People teams step up to an uncertain and constantly changing challenge. In a matter of weeks, we saw a team take their robust, thoughtful new hire onboarding process that they had developed over years and turned it into a completely remote experience.
With Sora, People teams are adapting, improving, and saving a ton of time.
Today, Plaid is getting back half its week thanks to Sora. Their HR and work tools – Lever, ADP, Slack, Google Suite – are connected, and onboarding processes are automated.
Teams like Flexport, Gainsight, and Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco are seeing the same success and using Sora as an integral part of their HR Operations. Importantly, all of our customers are able to use the time they get back to meaningfully improve employee experience at their companies.
We’ve seen everything that people teams have done over the last year, and we see the challenges they have in front of them. That’s why we're doubling down on our effort, scaling Sora to get it into the hands of even more People teams.
Today we’re setting off on the next leg of Sora’s journey, and joining us is Frances Schwiep at Two Sigma Ventures. With the $14m investment round led by Two Sigma Ventures that we’re announcing today, Sora – and the team behind it – will continue to grow.
We’ll now be able to invest in more HR Operations improvements, from reporting to communication to data integrity. We’ll be able to help People teams discover new ways to streamline and improve tedious processes with best practice templates, and suggest improvements in their existing Sora workflows to further People teams’ impact, efficiency, and consistency in their employee-facing work.
We’ll be able to deepen our existing integrations with tools like Workday, UKG, ADP, BambooHR, and Rippling. And we’ll also be able to build even more integrations in new HR Tech areas, like performance management – Lattice’s CEO, Jack Altman, also participated in our fundraising round.
And as the needs of People teams evolve and the HR tech industry continues to grow in response, Sora will be at the center, ensuring smooth communication among tools and allowing teams to craft best-in-class HR stacks — and best-in-class experiences.
After last year, we’re more sure than ever that Sora is the tool that HR and People teams need to better engage and retain their employees.
