The pandemic, work from home movement and Great Resignation have all shaken the labor market and affected compensation. More recently with talks of a looming recession on the way, businesses are becoming even more aware of compensation for their employees.
For companies, keeping track of fair compensation is essential to retaining current employees and also bring in new talent, but with all the recent shakeups doing so has become harder. San Francisco-based Pave is helping companies track and benchmark compensation.
On Tuesday, Pave announced that it raised $100 million in a Series C round led by Index Ventures. In addition to the funding, Pave also acquired Advanced-HR from Morgan Stanley.
Pave was founded in 2019 and has developed several HR platforms, including Benchmark which helps companies find and track fair compensation rates. Pave now helps over 2,500 companies manage, attract and retain their employees. The Benchmark platform is free to use as long as companies provide their compensation data to be included on the platform.
“Compensation is a visceral problem for every company. For generations, we have been stuck with offline, finger-in-the-air practices when figuring out how much to pay people. These problems are both universal and wildly expensive,” Mark Goldberg, a partner at Index Ventures, said in a statement. “The ubiquitous compensation pain felt worldwide is what made me particularly excited when I first met Matt [Schulman] and the Pave team. We are thrilled to fuel their growth to help Pave empower all global businesses and employees.”
With the new capital, Pave is acquiring Advanced-HR, previously owned by Morgan Stanley, and its platform Option Impact, a similar compensation benchmark tool. Terms of the acquisition were not dislcosed.
With the acquisition of Option Impact, Pave will rebrand the compensation product as Pave + Option Impact. The platform works similarly to Benchmark, but in addition to providing data compensation, it provides insight into what other companies are offering their workers in terms of equity and bonuses.
As per the acquisition, Pave will also work with Morgan Stanley to integrate its Benchmark platform with Morgan Stanley’s products.
“Morgan Stanley has long played a major role in the private markets and startup ecosystem and is a sought-after partner of many of the most interesting technology companies. Through our work with innovative companies like Pave, we help ensure that game-changing technologies are brought to bear to support our clients, advisors and the growth of our business overall,” Kevin Swan, co-head of Morgan Stanley at Work Global Private Markets, said in a statement.
Funds will also be used to expand Pave’s presence in Europe and eventually to other regions, according to Pave’s CEO and founder Matt Schulman.
