Benepass cofounders, Kabir Soorya (left) Jaclyn Chen (middle) and Mark Fischer (right) came together to help companies provide flexible benefits to their employees.
Every year the Forbes Cloud 100 Rising Stars list highlights the top 20 cloud startups that promise to be listed among the best private cloud companies in the future. This year’s list spots a number of startups looking to handle one of the most expensive tasks for most businesses: managing employees.
Benepass, for instance, is helping companies offer their employees flexible and customizable benefits. CEO and co-founder Jaclyn Chen believes this is even more crucial today, where rising inflation, hiring freezes, and the Supreme Court’s reversal on abortion rights could all impact an employee. “We are working with a number of companies that are providing support for travel out of state to seek medical care that may not be available in the state in which the employee lives. It's called a healthcare travel benefit,” Chen says.
Sargun Kaur, CEO of Byteboard, is helping ease the pressures on job candidates even before they get hired. After starting engineering roles at Google, Kaur and Byteboard cofounder Nicole Hardson Hurley realized that the coding prompts for the company’s grueling technical interview process were far from the tasks they were required to do on the job. The duo departed from Google four years ago to redesign the coding interview process for engineering roles with project-based prompts, human reviewers, and structured rubrics that would more closely mimic an engineer’s day-to-day. Byteboard has since gained traction from firms like Lyft and Figma. Kaur, 29, says that even as hiring freezes take over the tech industry, there are a few companies still hiring engineers. “Companies that are hiring are being smarter about how they hire,” she says. “They have less room to make mistakes and draw out the interview process.”
Nicole Hardson-Hurley (left) cofounder and CPTO and Sargun Kaur (right) cofounder and CEO used to work together at Google before deciding to leave and start Byteboard, a coding interview platform.
Other startups are looking at managing and paying employees in specific fields. At Seso, Stanford graduate Michael Guirguis is automating the recruiting, managing, and compliance processes for U.S. farmers who hire migrant workers. Canada-based Trolley has built a payout platform and API to assist businesses in paying workers such as creators, artists and vendors across 200 countries.
Jordan Taylor and Michael Guirguis
In 2019, Siobhan Savage, one of six women CEOs on the Rising Stars list, launched AI-backed hiring and workforce intelligence platform Reejig. The company’s mission, according to its website, is to make sure “zero potential is wasted” by providing technology to “automatically nudge people with hyper-personalized messages about career opportunities,” and identify employees within a company who are fit for a role. Three-time entrepreneur Amir Ashkenazi is on the list with Switchboard, a cloud-based tool that helps remote and hybrid teams work with all their applications in one place.
Other listees are selling cutting-edge technologies to improve other areas of business. Jamila Gordon, a Somali Australian entrepreneur, founded Lumachain in 2018 to improve traceability and transparency in the global food supply chain with the use of computer vision. Palo Alto-based Vannevar Labs is bringing software and language processing technology to the national security agencies in the U.S. While most companies are situated on the East and West coasts of the U.S., a handful of listees are spread across the globe: Berlin, Sydney, and Canada.
These companies, all of which have raised $25 million or less in total funding, were assessed based on various criteria such as financials, growth, marketing, leadership, and culture. The list is produced in partnership with Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures. Rising Star graduates from previous years now hold top places on this year’s Cloud 100 list: Canva (No.3), Figma (No. 5), Gong (No. 14), and—the latest Rising Star added—Dbt Labs (No. 79).