Zugata Announces $7 Million in Series A Funding from Canaan Partners, General Catalyst and Redpoint Ventures for Re-Imagining Performance Reviews

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 14, 2016) - Zugata today announced $7 million in Series A funding, led by Canaan Partners, the VC who invested in SuccessFactors. General Catalyst and Redpoint Ventures, who participated in the seed funding, also participated in this round. Zugata will use the funding to develop new products and to build sales and marketing teams.

With today's announcement, Canaan Partners General Partner Hrach Simonian and General Catalyst Managing Director Steve Herrod will join Zugata's board.

Simonian said: "Zugata is at the forefront of a paradigm shift in HR away from the inefficient ritual of annual reviews to continuous feedback and coaching, which is proven to be a much more effective way to impact employee performance and groom future talent. The Zugata platform is the closest thing we've seen to automated performance management and employee development -- we're excited to see the company scale to address the critical challenges organizations face in building the workforce they need to be competitive both today and years from now."

Zugata collects continuous feedback from the people employees work with the most and Zugata's recommendation engine, an industry first, delivers personal development resources to empower employees to develop in order to promote a culture of shared success, learning and empowerment. Zugata's analytics capabilities then make it possible for HR leaders to better understand team- and organizational-level skills and gaps so they can make better hiring decisions.

Zugata Co-Founder and CEO Srinivas Krishnamurti said: "Cutting-edge organizations are shifting the focus of performance reviews to helping employees develop instead of looking back to rate their performance. Employees need to get continuous feedback throughout the year but it's what they do with that feedback is critical to their development. We are uniquely positioned to tie feedback to development resources and track development progress over time."

More Than 500 Organizations Have Signed Up to Use Zugata
More than 500 organizations of all sizes -- from startups to publicly traded companies -- have signed up to use Zugata since the company emerged from stealth 12 months ago. Lyft, Gusto, Gainsight and Enjoy are among the companies that have deployed Zugata company-wide.

Lyft Head of People Ron Storn said: "As we looked to evolve our performance management process, the key requirement was to focus on helping our team members learn and develop continuously. Rather than looking back to rate someone's performance, we wanted to look ahead to create an environment where we could enable our team members to perform at their best. Zugata aligns well with our vision because it lets our team members receive continuous feedback from the people they work with and access personalized development resources."

Zugata Continues to Innovate and Adds New Integrations
Zugata has been adding new features every quarter since launching. Last quarter, Zugata rolled out four features:

• Goals - Companies can define department-level goals to align teams within departments. In addition, individuals also define their goals that align with department-level goals. Further, Zugata lets individuals specify the skills needed to achieve these goals so the appropriate development resources can be delivered automatically to the employees.
• Self Reflection - Individuals can reflect on their performance -- what's working, what's not working and how the manager can help -- and share that with their managers. This leads to more productive ongoing "check in" conversations between individuals and their managers.
• Jira Integration - Zugata can leverage metadata from Jira to compute the 'People I work with most' graph, which is the basis for gathering feedback from the people you actually work with.
• Zenefits Integration - Companies using Zenefits as their HRIS system can now automatically sync their employee information with Zugata to avoid manual entry and mundane maintenance of user information in multiple systems.

About Zugata
Zugata was founded in 2014 with a vision to use data to empower employees to reach their fullest potential. Its innovative mobile-first solution makes it possible for employees to receive continuous feedback from the people they work with, along with personalized development resources, so they can constantly improve and reach their true potential. Zugata creates a culture of shared success, learning and empowerment. Zugata is based in Palo Alto, CA and is backed by Canaan Partners, General Catalyst, Formation 8, Redpoint Ventures and Silicon Valley angel investors. For more information, go to http://www.zugata.com/ or follow Zugata on Twitter @ZugataInc.