Jocelyn King recalls the days when a seemingly simple labor inquiry from a staffer would take her hours of Googling or thousands in legal fees to answer.
As a human resources professional at high-growth companies like Target, Ocado Group and Stratum Networks over the years, King would need to sift through a long string of labor laws in different states to determine whether her employer was compliant. If an employee requested maternity leave in California, for instance, she'd need to contend with as many as five regulations — six if they lived in San Francisco — that could apply in different circumstances. She was either spending too much money, or too much time, and still wasn't sure if she was getting the right answers. “Especially because the laws change all the time and they're very nuanced down to the local level,” she said.
“The idea popped in my mind," she said, "it would be really cool if there was a way to use conditional logic programming to develop a piece of technology that could help provide guidance to HR professionals in the moment."
Four years and a new business plan later, her VirgilHR startup has now closed a $1.5 million pre-seed round backed by some serious venture names, including Baltimore VC firm Squadra Ventures; national tech accelerator TechStars; SHRMLabs, the VC arm of the Society for Human Resource Management; and Maryland Technology Development Corp (TEDCO).
The funding came in two years after King had saved up enough to pay herself for a few years, quit her last job and started VirgilHR in 2021. It's a software as a service company that blends with a company's HR information system and provides an automated chatbot, based on artificial intelligence technology, that gives HR professionals instant prescriptive guidance on employment and labor laws. It also provides a resource center to supplement a company's own HR work.
Going forward, VirgilHR plans to use the pre-seed funds on product and marketing to get the company in front of potential customers. King recently hired a product manager and a fractional chief marketing officer, or a part-time officer to lead its marketing strategy.
King is focusing on such marketing channels as industry conferences, advertisements, content development and search engine optimization. “This is all about gaining traction right now and then continually getting feedback from customers,” she said.
She's standing up a new brand in a field dominated by massive names, from ADP to Workday, and filled in by consulting behemoths from PricewaterhouseCoopers to Korn Ferry. Another company, Business and Learning Resources (BLR), a Brentwood, Tennessee, division of Simplify Compliance LLC, that offers corporate HR technology products, just launched its series of Human Capital Institute events for this year.
Thus far, VirgilHR is prerevenue, having launched the product this year. To build it, King had teamed with a now-U.K. technologist who built enterprise platforms and worked for the likes of WageWorks, Workday and Mercer; an engineering project manager based in Vietnam who worked for six years at Aperia Solutions Inc.; and an employment attorney whose past employers have included AB Staffing Solutions and Employers Council.
The challenge, she said, will be developing a go-to-market plan to help it along an ambitious growth plan. On average, the product costs individual HR executives $99 per month, HR teams $149 to $179 per month and full employers upward of $3,000 a year. And King said she's set the company on a path to generate as much as $42 million in revenue in the next five years.
VirgilHR currently has five employees, and King expects the company to grow to between 10 and 15 employees based on this first year of revenue.
