Wouldn't we all like to know what our colleagues earn?
It's about more than mere curiosity. Transparency about compensation levels can help combat bias in pay structures and ensure that businesses are making competitive offers.
Pave does just that by helping companies analyze their compensation structures to make them more equitable. On Tuesday, the San Francisco startup announced a $100 million Series C led by Index Ventures that also included Andreessen Horowitz, YC Continuity Fund, LocalGlobe, Craft Ventures, Original Capital, Backend Capital, Contrary Capital, former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and former Facebook executive Tudor Havriliuc.
After the funding the company's new valuation sits at $1.6 billion.
CEO Matt Schulman founded the company in 2019 and launched it just as the U.S. was shutting down due to Covid.
The 28-year-old founder had spent a couple of years as an engineer at Facebook after graduating from college, traveling and doing freelance coding for a year. He also did a stint working in fintech, where he noticed one theme that kept up at every job: compensation was complicated and opaque.
"All my friends were bewildered about their stock options, then I talked to the companies and the companies were stressed about their stock option packages. They were trying to communicate it to candidates and employees. Nobody really understood the details and everybody was told something different," Schulman told me. "It was inefficient and led to a lot of inequities."
Pave now offers three products that assess a wide range of compensation types from salaries to stock options to bonuses: Benchmark, Plan and Communicate.
Benchmark is a free market analysis tool that shows employers what the compensation landscape looks like. The other two products are available on an annual subscription basis. Plan continuously assesses a company's compensation structures without the need for manually surveying employee data, and Communicate is a tool that allows companies to share aggregated data with current and prospective employees.
Pave currently serves more than 2,600 companies in the U.S. with 275,000 employees collectively. Most of its customers are private companies but Schulman wants to serve more public companies by 2023.
The company is focused on the U.S. market for now but an expansion to Europe and other regions could be a possibility in the future, Schulman said.
"We view it as a space-race opportunity where the world wants one online compensation database or graph that serves as the canonical source of truth," Schulman said. "Our goal is to move as fast as humanly possible to ensure that we get as many customers integrated … before any other entity can."
On Tuesday, Pave also announced that it had acquired a compensation data operation from Morgan Stanley called Advanced-HR. Details of the deal were not disclosed.
Advanced-HR collects and analyzes employee data as well as executive compensation in the venture capital industry. Pave will eventually integrate Advanced-HR's services and data into its own suite of software.
Pave has around 140 employees of its own and Schulman wants to grow the team by more than 50% this year to around 220 people.
Other compensation equity startups that have popped up over the past few years include the San Francisco-based companies OpenComp and Pequity.
