Knoetic Launches with $18M Accel-led Series A to Give Chief People Officers and CHROs Superpowers

Knoetic, a startup "built with Chief People Officers, for Chief People Officers," emerged from stealth today, announcing an $18M Series A round of funding led by Accel. Over 100 angel investors also participated in this round, including New York Times bestselling author Adam Grant, and executives from Box, Figma, Johnson & Johnson, LinkedIn, Scale, Pinterest, Calm, Front, and more. 

Knoetic is the first company to unify a social network and a SaaS analytics tool in the same platform. By embedding its exclusive social network of 1,000+ world-class Chief People Officers, CPOHQ, directly into its people analytics software, the resulting "Insight Engine" gives CPOs both quantitative and qualitative insights, enabling them to make smarter, holistic decisions about their workforce. 

Chief People Officers use Knoetic to build their board decks, present data to their CEOs, solve challenges with peers, and improve their employee retention, compensation, and hiring. 

The rapidly-growing startup's customer + community base includes many of the world's top technology companies, including Lyft, Squarespace, Amplitude, Snyk, Dollar Shave Club, and Zapier. 

Joseph Quan, Knoetic's Founder & CEO, shared: "The 2020s are the decade of the Chief People Officer. Last year's challenges showed every CEO and Board the importance of having a strategic partnership with the People/HR team. Chief People Officers were at the center of every existential decision a company faces - What's the data on our company's turnover and hiring? How do we improve it? How will we deal with COVID? How can we scale culture as we go from 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 employees? How do I win in the war for talent?" 

"Knoetic gives Chief People Officers the answers to every one of those questions."

Vas Natarajan of Accel added, "The best companies have great people teams at their core. That's doubly true in today's era of distributed work and a hypercompetitive talent market. Knoetic delivers critical insights to CPOs and their teams so they can design for healthy, diverse, top-performing teams."

Adriana Roche, a 2-time customer and the Chief People Officer at MURAL, uses Knoetic's analytics product to get "HR data that's actionable, easy to share, and accessible in seconds. I don't need to rely on anyone else to make data-informed decisions; with Knoetic, I own my destiny as a People Leader." 

Heather Sullivan, the Chief People Officer at Discord, remarked, "Knoetic's CPOHQ network is the most phenomenal assembly of Chief People Officers sharing their wisdom and lessons learned. It's been a critical ally for me in the last 18 months, when our jobs as people leaders have never been harder or more critical to our companies' success." 

Over 1,000 other Chief People Officers use Knoetic's exclusive, referral-only community (named CPOHQ) to discuss their most pressing challenges. These include navigating the COVID delta variant, transitioning to remote work, and scaling through hypergrowth. 

Knoetic's Founder & CEO, Joseph Quan, spent over a decade exploring the implications and use of people analytics across his time at Berkeley, Wharton, Fortune 500 Innovation teams, and multiple ventures & products in the HR technology space (including Twine, Knoetic's predecessor company). 

"We're uniquely poised to give every single one of our users an unfair advantage as a CPO. Our analytics engine equips CPOs with the knowledge to know what's happening within their companies. And our community will equip them with the most interesting insights, playbooks, and best practices from a network of their most talented peers." 

The new capital will fuel new product innovation and the expansion of the Knoetic team. 

Alongside Accel's investment (led by Vas Natarajan), the $18M Series A also includes involvement from from Karan Mehandru (STEADFAST, and formerly Trinity Ventures), Dan Bomze (Founder/CEO of MileIQ), Sterling Road (Ash Rust), Bob Tinker (angel investor & Metamorph Partners), Jake Stein (Cofounder/CEO of Common Paper), Bob Moore(Cofounder/CEO of Crossbeam), Contrary Capital (Eric Tarczynski), Pear Ventures (Mar Hershenson & Pejman Nozad), and 100 other executives, thinkers, and founders.

About Knoetic 

Knoetic is a technology company that builds powerful software for 1,000s of Chief People Officers. The world's top companies use Knoetic's integrated community insights and people analytics software to make smarter data-driven decisions about their workforce.