Australian HR startup Culture Amp bags $82 million Series E funding to accelerate global expansion

Culture Amp, an Australian-based employee analytics platform that specializes in staff surveying and analytics, today announced it has raised $82 million in a Series E funding to accelerate global expansion and the development of innovative products and offerings that enable companies to build a better world of work. To date, Culture Amp has raised over $158 million in funding.

The round was led by Sequoia Capital China, a new investor in Culture Amp, with participation from existing investors Sapphire Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Index Ventures, Blackbird Ventures, Hostplus, Skip Capital and Grok Ventures. The round was also joined by new investors Global Founders Capital and TDM Growth Partners.

Founded in 211 by Didier Elzinga, Douglas English, Jon Williams,  and Rod Hamilton, the Melbourne, Victoria, Australia-based Culture Amp is a People & Culture Platform helping companies take action to improve employee engagement, retention and performance. The startup was founded as a result of its members’ first hand experiences with the challenge that fast growing organizations face when their core business expands faster than its people can adapt.

Culture Amp is a pioneer in generating real-time employee feedback, powered by the insights of behavioral science and data analytics. It has since added performance management and predictive capabilities that provide leadership teams with actionable engagement, retention and productivity metrics and trends. Culture Amp has also amassed collective intelligence from more than three million employee surveys and has built the largest independent dataset in the industry.

The startup urrently serves more than 2,500 global customers. Last month, Culture Amp hosted its second annual global conference, Culture First, in San Francisco. Culture First brought 1,200 HR practitioners and culture change leaders together to discuss how to more effectively impact workplace culture. Earlier this year, Culture Amp acquired award-winning performance management company Zugata Inc. The company has offices in Melbourne, San Francisco, New York and London, and employs nearly 400 people.

Commenting on the funding, Steven Ji, Partner of Sequoia Capital China, added: “Sequoia Capital China’s substantial investment in this stage of Culture Amp’s growth underscores our confidence that they have the vision and the leadership team in place to help companies take action on complex workplace issues. Culture Amp has carved out a dominant niche in the global market.”

“This round of funding will help us to continue to deliver on our mission of building a better world of work by getting the Culture Amp platform into the hands of more people, and more leaders, who believe that culture is the biggest lever that you have to be successful,” said Didier Elzinga, CEO and co-founder of Culture Amp. “It also underpins the deepening sophistication of one of our core competitive differentiators – our platform’s ability not only to pinpoint what is going on, and what to do about it, but to also drive the change necessary to bridge the knowledge to action gap at all levels of the organization.”

With this new raise, Culture Amp plans to expand more deeply within industries and geographic regions that are tackling seismic changes in workplace culture head on, including EMEA, Latin America and Asia. In addition to regional expansion, Elzinga says Culture Amp will continue to invest in building diverse and collaborative communities across the globe. The company currently has an active community of nearly 100,000 people, representing 147 countries.