Bambee Raises $30 Million to Give Small Businesses HR Help

Harri Weber

Harri is dot.LA's senior finance reporter. She previously worked for Gizmodo, Fast Company, VentureBeat and Flipboard. Find her on Twitter and send tips on L.A. startups and venture capital to harrison@dot.la.

Bambee founder and CEO Allan Jones
Courtesy of Bambee

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Bambee, a Los Angeles-based startup that takes care of human resources for small- and medium-sized businesses, has raised $30 million in new funding to scale up its HR tools and staff.

There are about 6 million small businesses in the U.S. with paid employees, and the vast majority of them—96%, according to Bambee founder and CEO Allan Jones—don’t have in-house HR services to address matters like hiring and anti-harassment training. That is the market Bambee is looking to serve.


Led by fintech-focused venture firm QED Investors, the new round takes Bambee’s total funds raised to date to $65 million. SoftBank, General Catalyst chairman Ken Chenault and American Financing CEO Damian Maldonado also joined in on the deal, as did Santa Monica-based Mucker Capital, L.A.-based Alpha Edison and Gaingels, a syndicate that aims to represent the LGBTQ+ community in venture capital.

Plenty of software companies offer HR and payroll services, including Gusto and Justworks, but Jones says that Bambee is the “only business that offers a dedicated HR manager for $99 [per month].” Bambee directly employs its HR managers, each of whom work on multiple client accounts (the number of which varies based on the size and complexity of the client’s business, per Jones).

Without sharing specific figures, Bambee said in a statement that it doubled its revenue last year and is on track to do it again in 2022. The nearly six-year-old company has just shy of 10,000 paying subscribers.

The Series C round will go toward expanding Bambee’s HR and payroll offerings as well as hiring 150 new employees, primarily at its Downtown L.A. headquarters. The firm also plans to grow its engineering team in Nashville.

A veteran of the L.A. tech scene, Jones dropped out of college to work at wireless network operator Helio in 2006, a few years before the startup was snapped up by Virgin Mobile. He went on to work with Peter Pham’s Science Inc., ZipRecruiter and early-stage investor Amplify before launching Bambee.

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Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.

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Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

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Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

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