Personio acquires employee experience solution Back to drive productivity for customers

Munich, 24th May 2022 – Personio – Europe’s leading HR software company for small and mid-sized organisations – announced today at its H.U.G Digital event that it has acquired Back, a Berlin-based employee experience solution that automates key people processes to boost efficiency. The acquisition supports Personio’s strategic direction to advance and expand the People Workflow Automation category, which enables HR teams in SMEs to work efficiently across departments and tools. 

Back’s software helps people teams to process employee requests and automate responses to recurring questions through conversational ticketing, knowledge management and workflow automation. It enables employees to submit requests and receive automated responses to frequently asked questions through daily communication channels such as Slack or Microsoft Teams. For example, if an employee needs to report an error in their payslip, they have a single place to ask this question – and HR can reply or even automate responses via an internal knowledge base powered by built-in artificial intelligence.

By managing requests and providing answers automatically in a single location, employees and employers can save time and focus on value-adding tasks. Employee experience is also improved, with remote or hybrid based staff benefitting from frictionless HR processes wherever they work.   

Hanno Renner, Co-Founder and CEO of Personio: “Back’s product and team are a great fit for us for two reasons. Firstly, our customers will benefit from a one-stop shop for employee requests or questions. Secondly, the Back team have brilliant experience in building workflows that bring fragmented tasks together. They will be a core part of continuing to evolve Personio into a People Workflow Automation category leader that drives productivity across every aspect of a business by removing delays and ensuring opportunities are not missed.”

Christian Eggert, Co-founder of Back and new Head of Product, Workflows and Integrations at Personio, said: “Back has always shared Personio’s vision to improve business performance through a focus on people operations and strategy. This is also why we were one of the first companies to integrate with the Personio platform. Through working together over the past years, we’ve realised that a fully integrated approach to workflow management within a people platform like Personio would result in a much better experience for our customers and their employees. We are therefore excited to join forces with a category defining HR software company and I can’t wait to accelerate the momentum of People Workflow Automation.”

Back’s existing products for ticketing and knowledge management will be fully integrated into Personio’s offer. Founders Christian Eggert (CEO) and James Lafa (CTO) will join Personio as Head of Product and Head of Engineering respectively for the Workflow, Ticketing and Knowledge functionalities within Personio. 

Personio also announced the opening of new offices located in Berlin and Barcelona to drive additional growth. The Berlin office will be home to 20 existing team members who have to date been working remotely from the area, and Back’s 13 employees who will all join Personio. Arseniy Vershinin, Personio co-founder and CTO, will relocate and become part of the Berlin leadership team. From the new offices Personio will gain access to further pools of tech talent and continue to rapidly and constantly expand and adapt its product to meet the respective market needs of customers across Europe.

Press enquiries:

Personio GmbH Matthew Tubbs Senior Communications Manager Tel: + 44 (0)7788163261 E-Mail: press@personio.de

UK & Ireland – Firstlight Group  Rosie Stafford Tel: + 44 (0)7769618500 E-Mail: personioteam@firstlightgroup.io

About Personio: Personio is the People Operating System for small and medium-sized companies with 10 to 2,000 employees. Based in Munich, Madrid, London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Berlin and Barcelona, Personio’s mission is to make HR processes as transparent and efficient as possible so HR can focus on what matters most: people. Personio does that by offering an all-in-one HR software that includes human resources, recruiting and payroll, enabling HR to go beyond HR. Thanks to People Workflow Automation technology Personio helps more than 6,000 customers across Europe to remove delays and realise opportunities. 

In October 2021, Personio received Series E funding, valuing the company at $6.3 billion. This not only makes Personio Europe’s most valuable HR tech company but catapulted it into the top 10 of Europe’s most valuable startups.