After boosting annual recurring revenues by 160% over the past year, human resources software maker Hibob Inc. has secured $150 million from investors to help it drive more growth.

The startup expects to increase sales by an additional 130% next year following the investment. Hibob says that 2022 is projected to mark its fifth consecutive year of triple-digit revenue growth.

The startup’s $150 million funding round, announced this morning, was led by prominent growth equity firm General Atlantic. Bessemer Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, Eight Roads, Entrée Capital and others chipped in as well. Their investment values Hibob at $1.65 billion.

Hibob operates a cloud-based HR platform built for midsized companies that are growing fast and have offices in multiple countries. The platform functions as a system of record where HR teams can store the documents they use in their day-to-day work. The platform doubles as a survey tool, providing the ability to conduct polls of executives and employees to gain a better understanding of business operations. Hibob also offers features for a long list of other HR tasks.

The startup provides data analytics tools alongside its core features to help HR teams extract more value from the information they generate as part of their work. Insights from executive and employee surveys, for example, can be visualized in graphs to uncover useful business patterns. A built-in reporting tool allows HR teams to track workforce trends and create reports that are automatically updated with new data as it becomes available.

One of the main selling points of Hibob’s platform is that its features are provided in a fairly simple user interface that draws inspiration from consumer software. For added measure, there’s a companion mobile app. Hibob argues that the platform’s consumer-grade interface enables it to provide a better user experience than traditional HR software.

The key benefit of a simple user experience is that it can improve productivity by enabling workers to spend less time navigating an application’s controls. A second benefit is the ability to speed up corporate software rollouts. An application with a consumer-grade user interface that doesn’t require any special training to use can be adopted faster by a company’s employees than a more complex piece of software.

Hibob’s value proposition has helped it win deals with about 1,500 midsize companies so far. To acquire customers in more markets, Hibob plans to use some of the proceeds from its newly raised funding round to open additional offices. Another portion of the $150 million investment will go towards acquisitions: Hibob intends to buy fellow startups with products that can complement its existing feature set.

“Hibob has created a solution that serves and anticipates the needs of modern, evolving businesses,” said General Atlantic Head of Technology Investing Anton Levy. “We have tracked the company for years, and positive customer feedback further validates that Hibob’s platform has become a mission-critical component of HR tech stacks.”

There’s a broad industry trend toward making enterprise software less complex that is not limited to the HR segment alone. More and more technology infrastructure management tools are being upgraded with AIOps features that partly or fully automate maintenance tasks such as troubleshooting network outages. In the analytics segment, a growing number of products is aimed at letting workers run complex business analyses and create dashboards without writing any SQL code.

Image: Hibob