Meet Jordi Romero, Co-Founder and CEO at HR Software: Factorial

Founded in 2016, Factorial is an all-in-one, digital workforce management solution that helps small and medium-sized businesses around the globe remain competitive by streamlining their HR systems, tools, and processes in one place.

The Factorial platform is also helping businesses to save valuable time and resources by automating traditionally time-consuming tasks, from employee time tracking to time off management, onboarding, offboarding, payroll, document management, and performance tools. As a result, companies can regain sight of the bigger picture, increasing their ability to focus on developing people and culture.

Crucially, the platform provides access to significant data-driven insights, meaning business owners can make informed decisions around time, talent, and finances. In doing so, the offering helps to transform HR administrators into HR business development partners who can focus on making an organisation more people-oriented.

How did you come up with the idea for the company? 

I grew up in Spain and enjoyed computer programming from a young age. At university, I started working with my father in software development.

In 2013, I founded my first startup, Teambox, which allowed me to travel between Barcelona and San Francisco while expanding the company internationally. There, I met fellow Factorial founder Pau Ramon.

When we returned to Spain, we met fellow entrepreneur Bernat Farrero, who was running the collaborative business networking service Itnig – a group of tech companies aimed at helping other businesses reach success. 

By 2016, we were all struggling to find a suitable solution to improve HR processes and scale the business as it grew. So, in true entrepreneur style, we decided to build one ourselves and soon realised that the all-in-one, cloud-based HR software solution was in high demand. 

What makes it stand out in the market is a core USP of measuring the platform’s success and evolution as if it were an online game; user engagement metrics are at the heart of the company strategy. This has been a key factor in our adoption by over 9,000 companies daily, and why Factorial has achieved Unicorn status. 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

In 2020, Factorial completed its Series A funding round, receiving USD 16 Million in funding to expand globally and continue to develop its product offering with more cutting-edge features.

In 2021, Factorial completed its Series B funding round worth USD 80 million and also opened new offices in the USA and Brazil.

We became a European unicorn after closing a Series C investment round of USD 120 million in 2022, with a valuation of USD 1 billion.

In six years, Factorial has grown by 200% – from having 30 clients in 2017 to over 9,000 companies across 65 countries already using Factorial every day.

What can we hope to see from Factorial in the future?

We made the acquisition of expenses management specialist Fuell this year. This takes the offering one step closer to achieving our mission of making Factorial the go-to all-in-one Business Management platform, by bringing an amazing financial product in-house and investing in proven essential solutions for our customers. 

The business also debuted AI capabilities this year, introducing an intuitive AI talent recruitment capability that speeds up the recruitment process by 35% and cuts costs by 30% per hire. It does this by automatically screening CVs and filtering clients before the first interview, which in turn helps HR teams prioritise the best talent and focus on growing their culture in the right direction. Other key capabilities of the technology include automatically suggesting and assigning key competencies for every team member regardless of role and level; and document analysis, involving generating document summaries and presenting important information, insights, and findings.

Both of these moves are good signposts for Factorial’s future intentions – to continue to develop into a holistic Business Management platform.