GoCo lands $7 million in Series A funding to simplify and transform outdated and complex HR & benefits management

• Round was led by ATX Seed Ventures and UpCurve solutions provider

• Exploring partnership for UpCurve to sell GoCo through its nationwide distribution network to hundreds of thousands of new customers

• Number of GoCo users increased 10-fold over past two years; plans to quadruple employees in 2019

• GoCo empowers SMBs and HR professionals to streamline the full HR process

• Platform simplifies daunting, complicated insurance benefits enrollment and management

GoCo, a SaaS platform that offers software that helps businesses simplify their human resources systems, has raised $7 million in Series A funding round to hire more staff, further platform development to extend the breadth of offerings and expand its customer base. The round was led by ATX Seed Ventures alongside the investment arm of UpCurve, Inc. (“UpCurve”), the small and medium-sized business (SMB) solutions provider, with participation from other strategic investors. This Series A round brings GoCo’s total funding to $12.5 million. GoCo is backed by additional investments from Salesforce Ventures, Corp Strategics, GIS Strategic Ventures, the venture arm of Guardian Life Insurance, and Digital Insurance, the largest employee benefits-only company in the US. ATX Seed Ventures is investing for the second time.

Founded in 2015 by Nir Leibovich, Jason J. Wang, and Michael Gugel, the Houston, Texas-based GoCo.io offers software that helps businesses simplify their human resources systems. The software solution includes hiring and onboarding procedures, a centralized system to record and organize all employees’ documents and data, payroll integration, benefits selection processes, personal records database, and more.

“UpCurve’s investment in GoCo demonstrates our commitment to empowering businesses with the best technology solutions, and after a year of carefully vetting dozens of potential HR tech platforms, we found GoCo to be the most intuitive and robust on the market,” said Peter Cannone, CEO of UpCurve. “Investing in and potentially partnering with GoCo to bring it to our vast network of businesses was an easy decision. The company reimagines modern HR at its finest, and we look forward to helping spur GoCo’s rapid growth.”

UpCurve is the wholly owned subsidiary of New Media Investment Group Inc., focused on delivering guided technology solutions to SMBs. In addition to the Series A investment, UpCurve and GoCo are exploring a partnership to bring GoCo’s technology to UpCurve’s nationwide business distribution network as the premier HR solution, which could enable GoCo to leverage New Media’s 200,000+ active customer relationships and local markets reach to an additional 5 million SMB potential customers, and exponentially grow GoCo’s customer base.

Over the past two years, GoCo has grown its customer base of employers into the thousands, increasing the number of individual GoCo users by 10x. Customers of all sizes and verticals have adopted the platform, including retail and gym franchises, school districts, technology companies, real estate brokerages, healthcare hospitality organizations and more. To support this rapid growth, GoCo plans to quadruple its number of employees in 2019.

“We are doubling down on our investment in GoCo, as it is positioned to become the platform of choice for HR professionals to break out of the chains of outdated and complex HR duties, and empowers them to spend more time on their employees and higher value tasks. GoCo is simply the best platform solution to do all this, and their increasing customer base supports it,” said Chris Shonk, managing partner at ATX Seed Ventures.

GoCo was founded in 2015 by CEO Nir Leibovich, Chief Technology Officer Jason Wang and Chief Product Officer Michael Gugel. It is the fusion of modern, paperless HR functions like employee onboarding, secure cloud-storage document management, eSignature workflows, time-off tracking and HR data reporting. As well, it is paired with simplified benefits enrollment and management, payroll sync and HR compliance enablement. The web and mobile based app empower employers to give employees 24/7 access to the full spectrum of a company’s HR and benefits offerings.

As well, the company has a solid partnership network with employee benefit insurance agencies like OneDigital and PayneWest, and general agencies like Word & Brown, to offer GoCo’s technology as an enhancement to their existing insurance benefits services clients. GoCo also auto-syncs with leading payroll providers ADP, PayChex, Paylocity, Intuit Quickbooks and more, thus uniquely enabling businesses to maintain their benefits broker and payroll provider by integrating with GoCo’s platform.

“This Series A and the potential addition of UpCurve’s distribution channel to reach hundreds of thousands of new customers continues our mission to free SMBs and HR professionals from outdated and tedious administrative burdens. When these professionals look at current HR and benefits solutions on the market and think ‘there must be a better way,’ we are the better way,” said Leibovich. “We want to be synonymous with modern and streamlined HR.”