One of Greater Philadelphia's tech unicorns is expanding again.
Ambler-based Phenom has acquired Tydy, an India-based firm focused on human resources preboarding and onboarding capabilities.
Financial terms of the deal, which was announced Tuesday, were not disclosed.
This marks Phenom's fifth acquisition and its first in more than two years. With the deal, Phenom will add over 40 mostly remote employees to its existing workforce of about 1,500, co-founder and CEO Mahe Bayireddi told the Business Journal.
Phenom's human resources platform uses artificial intelligence, data and machine learning to streamline the hiring process for both recruiters and candidates. About 600 million people globally will apply for jobs this year on Phenom's platform, according to Bayireddi, and the company has more than 500 enterprise customers.
Tydy has customers in 30-plus countries and more than 8,000 human resources users with over 190,000 employees, according to its website.
The acquisition will expand Phenom's capabilities, allowing it to keep employees on its platform not only throughout the application and recruiting process but into the onboarding process as well. Phenom has been developing onboarding products for about the past three years, Bayireddi said, but the deal will speed up bringing a product to market in various industries.
The Phenom CEO said that developing such technology for onboarding is complicated by the greatly varying processes across industries. A retail job's onboarding, for example, includes learning the products and the store's systems, whereas in health care it includes learning the proper protocols and procedures. In manufacturing, it involves learning the machinery.
Being able to offer Phenom's wide-ranging customer base a platform with those nuances built in was a major attraction in the deal, Bayireddi said. He noted the company began exploring potential acquisition opportunities about six months ago before engaging in talks with Tydy, which has a U.S. base in Brooklyn.
"That know-how is what really Tydy can give us to really speed up our product to market into the hands of our customers much more aggressively and much more succinctly," Bayireddi said.
Tydy was founded in 2019 by Kiran Menon, Gaurabh Mathure and Nikhil Gurjer, who will join Phenom as "product leaders," according to Bayireddi.
"We believe that Tydy’s technology and workflows will become a key piece of Phenom’s holistic approach to deliver the best hiring, growth and retention outcomes in the industry," said Menon, Tydy's CEO, in a statement.
It's a sentiment Bayireddi echoed, saying he sees opportunity for Phenom to be a leader in human resources, specifically leveraging artificial intelligence to be an end-to-end product.
"That's the primary angle we're really looking at, the growth of the company and how can we really build a purposeful company for a very long time," Bayireddi said.
Phenom will focus on organic growth going forward, Bayireddi said, but that could change with the right acquisition opportunity.
"If we see the case [where] something can accelerate our growth and accelerate our product development faster and can really become consolidated into what our culture is or our product is, then we are really going after it," Bayireddi said.
