Calling itself the only help desk specifically built for human resource (HR) teams, Ariglad has raised $1.3 million CAD to refine its product and expand its reach to new clients.
Y Combinator made the largest investment, and the round also saw participation from January Ventures, The Fund, and TNT Ventures. The round closed last November. Ariglad is also currently participating in the Y Combinator program, and was bootstrapped until joining.
The name Ariglad comes from the Danish word arbejdsglade, which means happy at work.
Ariglad’s artificial intelligence (AI) brings order to the chaos of HR ticket systems, according to co-founder and CEO Sophie Wyne. Ariglad’s product integrates with any medium through which company employees communicate, and with human resources information systems.
That serves two purposes. Employees can ask questions about topics related to HR, legal, and finance, and their query will be dispatched to the right person in the company to quickly triage the question. At the same time, it provides company leaders with understanding about what employees are asking and might care about.
“If you’re seeing an uptick in benefit questions in engineers from your Vancouver office, like 20 percent last quarter, that’s helpful to know,” said Wyne. “Did you release a policy that’s confusing? Were there any changes that you might need to address? So it kind of gives an idea of what is that pulse going on in that organization.”
Wyne called Ariglad a scrappy startup that is going after an underserved space, even selling their software to Silicon Valley companies despite its Canadian home base. She said the company is introducing honed systems to make those teams more efficient, while tapping into AI and machine learning to help them achieve those efficiencies.
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The name Ariglad comes from the Danish word arbejdsglade, which means happy at work. The company was launched in 2020 as an anonymous HR reporting tool that provides employees with a safe way to report workplace issues. Ariglad pivoted after customers brought up the opportunity to create a help desk solution.
Ariglad works on a SaaS model, charging on an annual basis for the customer to access its product. The cost is determined according to the number of employees a company has, and how many will access the tool.
While Wyne said the ticketing tool space has a lot of competition, customers usually approach Ariglad once they’ve outgrown those and need something that’s more specific to HR, legal, and finance.
Currently, Ariglad employs six people. Wyne anticipates hiring another three in the next month.