People management startup Lattice closes $175M investment at $3B valuation

Lattice, a startup with a popular cloud-based people management platform, today said that it has raised $175 million in fresh funding.

The funding round was backed by Thrive Capital, prominent startup investor Elad Gil, Tiger Global and Dragoneer. More than a half dozen returning backers contributed as well along with a number of angel investors.

San Francisco-based Lattice, incorporated as Degree Inc., said that the funding round increases its valuation from $1 billion to $3 billion. The threefold valuation increase is particularly notable given that it took place in under a year. One reason why Lattice is worth $2 billion more than in early 2020 is its rapid growth: TechCrunch reported that the startup has added over 1,000 customers since last March and now has north of 3,500 organizations in its installed base. 

Lattice provides a cloud-based platform that helps companies manage their workforces. The platform consists of several integrated tools each focused on simplifying a different set of tasks.

As part of its platform, Lattice provides features for implementing the popular OKRs approach to managing business initiatives. OKRs is a methodology that companies use to set business goals and track how effectively they are reaching those goals. Originally pioneered at Intel Corp., the methodology is now widely used among enterprises, especially in the tech sector. 

Lattice’s platform enables managers to create a centralized dashboard that displays business objectives for their teams. The dashboard also tracks how much progress is being made towards each objective. For example, if a business unit sets a goal of acquiring 50 new customers within a year, Lattice can pull data from the company’s Salesforce environment to display how many new customers have been onboarded so far.

Lattice also provides tools that organizations can use to run workforce surveys. The startup’s platform makes it possible to create polls for evaluating eNPS, a metric used to measure worker engagement. It’s based on the popular NPS, or net promoter score, metric, which many companies in the tech industry rely on to measure customer attitudes towards their products.

Another set of features offered by Lattice enables companies to distribute brief polls known as pulse surveys. Companies use pulse surveys to perform tasks such as collecting feedback about a specific business initiative.

Lattice’s platform includes numerous other features that address related use cases such as workforce performance management. Providing a broad array of software capabilities in a single, integrated offering helps startups address the requirements of enterprise customers with complex operational requirements. Deploying a single platform is often more convenient for a large company than using multiple specialized tools. 

“This new funding is a vote of confidence in Lattice’s belief that the world is ready for a new generation of people management products that put employees’ interests first,” said Lattice co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jack Altman.

Previously, employee management specialist Rippling raised $250 million at a $6.5 billion valuation in October. Earlier, Tiger Global, one of the investors that participated in Lattice’s newly announced funding round, led a $80 million investment in Factorial. Factorial, officially Everyday Software SL, offers a cloud-based human resources platform used by more than 76,000 companies worldwide. 

Image: Lattice