Montréal talent-management software platform Workleap has acquired Toronto-based compensation planning software platform Barley as it gears up to launch a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool.
The acquisition will allow the company to add new compensation management features to Workleap, which it has wanted to explore for some time, but which took a back burner while the firm was building out its employee engagement and performance evaluation offerings, Workleap CEO Simon De Baene told BetaKit in an exclusive interview.
“It brings us to a new market, but it’s completely supporting what we’ve been doing forever.”
Simon De Baene
Workleap CEO
“Whenever you’re talking about [employee] performance, it’s rare for compensation to not be the next conversation,” De Baene said. “There’s a lot of fancy things that you can start doing once you build a bridge around these two worlds.”
De Baene declined to disclose the financial details of the deal, but said Barley’s six-person team will join Workleap as the product is integrated into the larger platform.
Barley founders Jafar Owainati and Billy Mainguy are “in charge of Barley’s destiny” on the Workleap team, De Baene said, who noted he was impressed (and a little envious) such a small team could build a product like Barley.
“It’s like a match made in heaven,” De Baene said. “It brings us to a new market, but it’s completely supporting what we’ve been doing forever.”
Barley was founded in 2021 by a pair of repeat Canadian tech entrepreneurs in Loopio co-founder Owainati and Reelhouse chief product officer Mainguy. The startup, which helped companies structure, analyze, and manage employee compensation, officially launched in 2023 after raising $5.4 million CAD from the likes of Toronto-based Golden Ventures and Union Capital.
Founded in 2006 as GSoft, Workleap rebranded in June 2023 and provides human resources (HR) teams with employee engagement and performance evaluation tools. De Baene described Workleap as an “HR sidekick,” filling in the gaps of other HR tools that focus on compliance and payroll.
After being bootstrapped for its entire existence, Workleap began to pursue acquisitions when it broke past $100 million in annual recurring revenue in 2021, starting with its purchase of Québec City learning management company Didacte. Workleap then secured a $125-million investment from La Caisse, and promptly used it to acquire Austin, Texas-based HR tech firm Pingboard and now Barley.
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“We were profitable as a business, but La Caisse gave us the deeper pockets to make M&A possible with confidence,” De Baene said. “It was fun to be bootstrapped and doing everything our own way, and I think we still do.”
With a few acquisitions under its belt and its platform built out, De Baene said Workleap has “everything in place” to integrate Barley into its product faster than usual and expects customers to be able to access it within the Workleap platform by this October. However, Workleap customers will have access to a new tool, Workleap AI, within the next week, De Baene said.
De Baene expects the AI tool, which is currently only available as a demo, to help HR staff parse and gather insights from the large amounts of employee performance and engagement data gathered by the Workleap platform. When Barley is a more fulsome part of Workleap, he envisions being able to use the tool to look for correlations between employee engagement and compensation.
“It’s not things that are impossible to accomplish right now, but I think it’s a lot of things that we don’t allow ourselves to do because it will just take too much time,” De Baene claimed. “I’m not going to ask someone to work on that for three months to give me an answer. Now, I can ask a question and have it on the spot.”
Feature image courtesy Workleap.