• Saudi Arabia-based HR solutions startup has closed an undisclosed Bridge funding round, led by Nama Ventures with participation from other prominent angel investors from Saudi Arabia.

• Founded in 2019 by Richard Schrems, Christoph Czichna and Dragan Nikolic, Palm.hr aims to deliver a streamlined and intuitive work experience for teams of all sizes in the Mena region. It handles everything from onboarding, time and vacation tracking, payroll and offboarding, all fully compliant with local standards and regulations.

• The HR solutions startup plans to extend its services to further GCC countries and North Africa. Tamara, the Saudi fintech, is one of its key clients.

Press release:

The groundbreaking HR tech platform palm.hr has successfully raised a bridge round led by Nama Ventures with participation from other prominent angel investors from Saudi Arabia.  Palm.hr is set to redefine the HR & employee experience for SMEs throughout the Middle East.

People spend a third of their life working, but poor HR often hinders a productive work culture and demotivates employees with tedious administration.  Palm.hr’s mission is to ensure more & more people wake up in the morning feeling engaged and excited going to work, so the product was built to deliver a streamlined and intuitive work experience for teams of all sizes. 

 Palm.hr handles everything from onboarding, time & vacation tracking, payroll, offboarding and much, much more – all fully compliant with local standards and regulations.

Palm.hr was founded in 2019 by Richard Schrems, Christoph Czichna and Dragan Nikolic. Together, they create a dynamic, high-performance leadership team. Richard, the CEO, has worked in Saudi Arabia for the past 6 years as a leading HR Consultant, soon realizing firsthand the pain small & medium businesses were facing with traditional HR technology. Christoph, COO, has 9 years working in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh as a Commercial Director and loves to leverage technology to catalyse real change. Dragan comes from a computer science background and leads a team of 15 Palm.hr in-house developers in Belgrade, Serbia. Together, the three founders joined forces in 2019 to start building an employee & HR experience platform people actually enjoy using.

As Richard explains, “People are the single biggest influence on the success of any business, yet over 75% of companies do not use a digital solution to manage them. Our ambition is to become the category-leading work experience platform for companies in the Middle East – getting people engaged and working as efficiently as possible. With hundreds of companies using our platform in Saudi Arabia already, we are excited to offer our solution across the GCC & Mena region in coming months.”

Abdulmajeed Alsukhan, CEO of the fintech startup Tamara, one of Palm.hr’s growing list of clients, had this to say: “Palm.hr has been a game-changer for us. We have never seen a software product adapt and improve as frequently as they do. In a competitive talent landscape, it is a great advantage for us to offer our team a solution that not only handles all administrative HR tasks but helps build a better company culture overall. Being a fast-growing company, we are highly grateful to have a partner by our side that can help us throughout our fast-paced journey.” It is this transformative potential that has attracted Nama Ventures to Palm.hr since the start of their entrepreneurial journey. “We have been nothing but impressed with the Palm.hr team, this team has seen it all, and has always managed to stay the course and be single focused on delivering best of breed solutions for their clients,” says Mohammed Alzubi, Managing Partner of Nama Ventures. “Palm.hr is exactly what we look for in a seed opportunity: a complementary founding team with deep domain expertise in the HR space and has delivered a game-changing platform for SMEs in Saudi Arabia. We are honoured and privileged to work with them, learn from them, and add value on their high-growth journey.”