People analytics startup by ex-Gallup consultants raises seed round

The EngageRocket team / Photo credit: EngageRocket

EngageRocket wants to make people management less tedious. It does this by simplifying how HR managers collect and analyze actionable data on employees. Some of its customers include Tokopedia, Shopback, and Singapore Power.

The startup has received a boost today, raising a US$640,000 seed round led by SeedPlus and Found Ventures. In total, it has received US$1 million from investors including JobCentral co-founder Huang Shao-Ning.

EngageRocket founders Leong Cheetung and Dorothy Yiu understand the pain of measuring employee performance. Previously the regional director of management consulting firm Gallup Southeast Asia, Leong was also a Singapore Armed Forces scholar and read economics at the University of Cambridge.

Meanwhile, Yiu was the head of operations for Gallup Southeast Asia. Together, they discovered that senior leaders generally dislike people management and often resolve team issues using gut feel, which leads to inconsistent results.

While consultants can help managers perform better, they are expensive and can only impact a few leaders at the time.

“Free survey tools were great at the data collection aspect of surveys, but still left a large analytical gap which HR teams were not designed to fill. They were also unable to automate enough of the process to make the exercise worthwhile,” says Leong.

Beyond allowing users to build surveys with validated questions, EngageRocket can spot employees who are at risk of leaving the company. It even has a chatbot feature to help employees create a personalized development plan.

It also uses meta-data from the surveys – such as login behavior, participation rate in the survey, and more – to analyze employee happiness. It hasn’t ruled out collecting even more types of data in the future.

Established in October 2016, EngageRocket counts 27,000 individual users and has analyzed over half a million survey responses to date. Its pricing is based on three factors: number of employees, modules deployed, and the level of implementation support. “This is usually a fraction of the cost of a consulting project of similar magnitude,” says Leong.