London-based HR platform CharlieHR raises £1 million seed round

CharlieHR, a HR platform for small businesses, has raised a £1 million seed investment from Connect Ventures and Seedcamp.

A number of angel investors also participated in the funding round: Nutmeg founder Nick Hungerford, Balderton Capital partner James Wise, Huddle founder Alistair Mitchell, and Songkick founder Ian Hogarth.

The London-based startup was launched in September of last year, emerging from startup studio The Eleven, and develops a free HR platform for small business managing their employees. The startup plans to monetise through its own marketplace for products and services for businesses.

CharlieHR is currently used by more than 650 companies. The new funds will be used to further develop its platform and marketplace as well as continue to expand into Europe.

“We created CharlieHR to solve our own constant frustration with boring everyday admin that got in the way of doing what we loved. Too many spreadsheets and too many emails,” said CEO Rob O’Donovan. “We felt that much of it could and should be automated, and that while building a company is hard, running one shouldn’t be.”

“The founders have spent years building businesses and understand the pain of scaling operations and teams,” added Sitar Teli, managing partner at Connect Ventures. “Their goal of building great, enjoyable to use software to ease that pain is both ambitious and challenging and we're excited to support them.”