Borderless AI Ventures Inc., a Toronto-based developer of human resources software, today announced that it has raised $5 million in fresh funding.

The capital was provided as an extension to a $27 million seed round the company closed last year. The latest raise included the participation of Aidan Gomez and Ivan Zhang, co-founders of large language model developer Cohere Inc., which nabbed a $500 million funding round of its own last June that valued it at $3.5 billion.

Hiring international employees can be challenging for enterprises because it requires navigating local employment regulations. The larger the number of countries in which a company has staff, the more complicated the task becomes. Borderless AI’s HR platform promises to simplify the workflow.

The platform provides access to employer of record, or EOR, services in more than 170 countries. An EOR is a company that can take over the legal responsibilities associated with hiring international employees to simplify enterprises’ regulatory compliance efforts. It also eases related tasks such as payroll management.

Borderless AI offers its core EOR offering alongside a number of other features. There’s an artificial intelligence expense management tool that enables workers to upload receipts for business purchases and request reimbursements. HR teams, meanwhile, have access to a centralized file repository for storing employment documents. 

Shortly after launching last May, Borderless AI inked a partnership with Cohere. The companies set out to train a custom AI model for its HR platform. In conjunction with its announcement of the investment from Cohere’s founders, Borderless AI today expanded its AI feature set with a new tool called HRGPT.

The company positions the offering as a search engine for HR use cases. A chatbot interface enables HR teams to find regulatory requirements and other information necessary for their work using prompts. Employees, meanwhile, can query HRGPT about topics such as their company’s expense reimbursement policy. 

Under the hood, the tool uses AI to scan an enterprise’s internal file repositories for relevant information. Borderless AI says that HRGPT can also fetch data from the public web. It includes citations in each prompt response to let workers verify the underlying AI models’ output. 

Besides retrieving information, HRGPT can also automate common HR tasks. It generates employment contracts to help companies avoid the legal expenses associated with creating an agreement from scratch. It’s likewise capable of creating job descriptions. 

Borderless AI will use its new funding to build more search features and launch HR-optimized AI agents.

Image: Borderless AI