Edison Partners today announced leading a $7.5 million growth investment in Emplify, the Fishers, Indiana-based employee engagement measurement company. Proceeds will be used for continued product innovation and to accelerate customer acquisition and growth.
Market analysts indicate that employers spend upwards of $76 billion annually on employee engagement across recognition, wellness, talent management and measurement. However, there are few standard performance measures to tie employee engagement with business performance. Emplify solves this problem with a SaaS platform that provides an omni-channel survey application, interactive analytics, KPI-scoring and step-by-step actions supported by engagement strategists to improve employee engagement, culture and performance.
During the last 12-months, Emplify has experienced dramatic customer growth, increasing annual revenue by more than 450 percent. The company works directly with more than 200 companies, and recently, introduced the Emplify Partner Program to support the employee engagement initiatives that talent and human capital management (HCM) consulting firms lead with their customers.
"While employee engagement is often viewed as a cornerstone to business growth and profitability, most employers remain unable to quantify this critical performance metric. This avoidable gap exists as the war for talent escalates and the demographics of the US workforce go through a sea change, with Millennials set to become the majority of the labor workforce," said Ryan Ziegler, General Partner for Edison Partners, who led the investment. "Empify is making employee engagement a best-practice KPI supported with actionable insight that can be owned by the C-Suite organization to advance their businesses. They are far ahead in this strategy and we're excited to partner with Santiago to fuel Emplify's next stage of growth."
Through its recent 2018 Growth Index study, Edison Partners similarly found that fast-growing companies have these people-related traits in common: strong employee growth, retention, and revenue per employee. This people equation is powered by strong corporate cultures that promote employee engagement and assessment on a continual basis, not just annually.
"The best and fastest-growing companies embrace and measure employee engagement as a must-have KPI to better run their businesses and win at, what Edison calls, the people equation. They know that employee culture, engagement and productivity are inextricably linked," said Santiago Jaramillo, CEO and Co-founder of Emplify. "We're thrilled to partner with Ryan and the Edison team. They share these beliefs and uniquely offer an integrated approach; one team of investors and operators working side-by-side to help us grow and scale."
Emplify is the third Edison Partners investment in the Midwest over the last four months. For more than 30 years, Edison has identified and invested in exceptional growth ecosystems located outside Silicon Valley. The Indianapolis metro-area offers an emerging technology hub with strong State support and economic incentives. Breakout companies like Emplify have enjoyed strong engineering and business talent from local educational institutions. Indiana's reasonable cost of living and wages are also very conducive to building a sustainable technology business.
Edison Partners has financed and guided more than 200 private companies, a quarter of which have been in the enterprise solutions space. Blue Medora, Bento for Business, and Emplify are the firm's most recent growth equity investments in the Midwest region. Edison's current enterprise solutions portfolio includes All Traffic Solutions, Blue Medora, Bricata, eSentire, Giant Oak, ItemMaster, Jornaya, Predata, PathFactory and Terminus. Notable exits in the sector include Archive Systems, Assessment Systems, Axent, Billtrust, InSoft, Logfire, Marcam, Notable Solutions, Operative, Tangoe, Telarix, VirtualEdge, Vocus, Uptivity, and VFA.
About Emplify
Emplify, a leader in employee engagement measurement, enables executives to ask for, analyze, and act on employee feedback - transforming actionable insight into action. Informed by science and psychometrics, Emplify is the first to fuse survey insights, employee communication, performance enhancement, and transformation strategists into a proven agile engagement system. Leading impact-makers at companies like Terminus, Harley-Davidson, Appirio and Cheetah Digital trust Emplify to power better people decisions. Learn more at emplify.com.
About Edison Partners For more than 30 years, Edison Partners has been helping CE
For more than 30 years, Edison Partners has been helping CEOs and their executive teams grow and scale successful companies. The firm's investment team brings extensive investing and operating experience to each investment. Through a unique combination of growth capital and the Edison Edge platform, consisting of operating leverage, the Edison Director Network, and executive education programs, Edison employs a truly integrated approach to accelerating growth and creating value for businesses. A team of experts in financial technology, healthcare IT and enterprise solution sectors, Edison targets high-growth companies with $5 to $20 million in revenue; investments also include buyouts, recapitalizations, spinouts and secondary stock purchases.
Edison's active portfolio has created aggregated market value exceeding $10 billion. Edison Partners is based in Princeton, NJ and manages more than $1.4 billion in assets throughout the eastern United States.