Some years ago, Dhiraj Sharma, who owns his own software consultancy, was given the task of creating an app to better the process of bringing on new staff by an HR tech company. Instead of creating something singular and rudimentary, Sharma was the driving force behind what would turn into the Simpplr platform, eventually forming its own entity.
Simpplr is offering businesses an internalized social platform which lets employees make profiles, distribute content, track other users, and take surveys or polls on a specialized intranet. Directors can build an employee index, and form social workspaces designed for certain teams and divisions.
It appears that business is going very well for Simpplr. This morning it was announced that there was a funding round of $70 million with Sapphire Ventures leading the pack and Tola Capital, Norwest Ventures and Salesforce Ventures all taking part. This, on top of its earlier funding of $61 million, will be used to bolster their staff, as well as to help fund research and product development.
Sharma, who is the Chief Executive Officer of the company, informed TechCrunch by email that Simpplr is especially designed for business owners to be able to use without being entirely reliant on IT. Simpplr will provide every worker at the company a spontaneous and dependable source of information by providing uncomplicated access to content, instruments, and resources which will further support communication, cooperation, connection, and effectiveness.
Despite budgetary restrictions, IT decision makers have seen the value of “employee experience” software, even during difficult economic times, and prioritized investing in technology which improves the employee experience and involvement. This is especially true during the shift to hybrid and remote work.
Start-ups in this area gained advantage. As an example, Culture Amp, which seeks to enable employers to turn the data they gain from anonymous staff assessments into knowledge, brought in $100 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion in July 2021 and was one of the more successful ones.
Statistics from Workvivo have discovered that 57 percent of workers do not understand the reason for their organization’s intranet. However, Simpplr seems to have successfully taken advantage of the investment trend, regardless of this, expanding their customer roster to more than 700 companies including Moderna, Penske, Snowflake, and AAA.
Sharma anticipates that Simpplr’s yearly income generated by regular customers will increase by 70% (or more) in the upcoming 12 months when compared to the past year.
Despite the challenges of having competition such as Workday and ServiceNow, Simpplr has been doing exceedingly well. According to Sharma, the main factor to this is its AI-focused strategy. He demonstrated the way that Simpplr is making use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT for its “SmartWriting” function which aids customers in personalizing corporate material intended for workers.
Sharma stated that artificial intelligence is at the center of the platform. Simpplr’s AI-based employee experience system grants IT personnel the ability to hand the control of content and digital experiences over to their business users.
Simpplr utilizes AI for analyzing sentiment and emotion, which could worry people due to potential biases in the algorithms developed for detecting emotion. A news article from Vice in 2017 exposed that a Google API used for ascertaining if a text had a good or bad feeling was found to usually assign negative sentiments to sentences about religious and ethnic minorities.
Simpplr gathers a vast amount of information which they use to assess emotions, opinions, and language habits, allowing them to predict any potential issues quickly before they become bigger matters. This monitoring of data points across the platform provides active and passive listening so that they can keep up with evolving trends and attitudes.
This second part creates curiosity concerning which real ‘phenomena’ Simpplr is carefully observing. Is it regarding work regulations? Or is it user reactions to emojis? It isn’t totally clear.
Sharma didn’t provide any information about what measures Simpplr has put in place to reduce the probability of bias in the sentiment and emotion analysis algorithms. He selected not to reply to questions about Simpplr’s privacy policy, such as how long user data is kept and if people can get rid of that data without much effort.
Despite its opaque nature, Simpplr appears to have an optimistic outlook ahead, having already employed 450 workers and anticipating further growth in the upcoming period.
Sharma noted that Simpplr has been spared from the wider downturn affecting the tech industry. Since the company works with over 30 different industries, decisions that have been delayed or budgets that have been reduced have not had a major effect on its growth. He also expressed gratitude for the company’s sensible management, which has been beneficial no matter what the economic climate might be.
