What the business is
Humaans is a UK HR platform that helps teams onboard, manage and grow employees through fast workflows, automation and integrations with tools like Google Workspace, Slack, DocuSign and Greenhouse.
The bet
HR software should work like modern product tools — one fast, integrated people-data layer that replaces both legacy suites and spreadsheet sprawl.
Starting capital
$5M initial seed, followed by $15M in 2022.
How it started
Giovanni Luperti and Karolis Narkevicius came from product design, where tools had gotten fast and pleasant; HR software had not. With an initial proof of concept they joined Y Combinator, and after graduating founded Humaans.
What happened
Raised a $5M seed and then $15M in 2022, with product-led founders as angels. On 24 January 2023 it launched Tables, for browsing, filtering, reporting and bulk-editing people data — aimed at the spreadsheets that HR, People and Finance teams still used because suites stored data in silos that went stale and leaked through Slack and email.
What has to be true
Europe's fragmented per-country compliance makes people data painful exactly where one-size-fits-all suites are weakest.
The founder-angel roster doubles as distribution: product-led CEOs buy tools their peers built and vouch for.
Tables attacks the spreadsheet — HR tech's real competitor — instead of trading feature lists with other HR suites.
What can be applied
When incumbents feel clunky, import the interaction standards of the tools users already love — and recruit the founders who build that way as your angels.
Aftermath
As of 24 January 2023 Humaans had just launched Tables and was positioning it for the layoff wave as well as for growth: reviewing performance and compensation data when cutting costs, tracking retention signals when keeping essential staff.
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