Demand for HR technology solutions is growing in Africa, and Senegal-based Socium is stepping up to capitalize on opportunities in the continent’s French-speaking country.
Starting in 2021, Socium has built HR solutions targeting users in 21 French-speaking African countries and plans to continue narrowing its focus to this region where it enjoys a first-mover advantage.
Socium co-founder Samba Lo (CEO) disclosed these plans to TechCrunch and said the startup has raised $5 million in seed funding to fuel its growth plans in the region.
“So for us, deployment within French-speaking Africa is very exciting. We have the same economic community, we have very strict regulations, we use the same currency, and the HR software market is also very large. So for this reason we prefer to stay in French-speaking Africa. Because there is so much to do here,” said Lo, who co-founded the startup with Serigne Seye.
Socium’s solutions help customers recruit, pay, and manage talent. But that was never what the pair proposed when they first got together in 2021.
Lo said the company initially started as a recruiting website to find talent and help people find jobs. Then they discovered that the HR world is huge.
“Customers started asking if we had a solution for payroll management, a solution for time management, a solution for performance management. And we decided to build a global HR platform to help HR manage all processes,” said Lo.
That’s how it set out to build a solution that “could work everywhere, from Morocco to Cameroon to the Congo,” citing some of the countries the startup plans to expand into in 2023.
For example, the company built a payroll engine that takes into account the complexities of salary calculations in a given region. This allows startups to enter a new country in less than two weeks, which is faster than foreign-based solutions.
Socium’s solutions reduce human resources and payroll workload by automating routine tasks, and use AI to easily score CVs, link them to job offers and assist in writing job descriptions. This allows HR managers to focus on more important roles, such as managing and supporting teams to achieve their goals.
“Focusing on people means focusing on each individual’s performance, assessments, competencies and career path. For this reason, our main focus is to provide ongoing support to help them get to work, make their daily tasks easier to manage and allow them to focus on the most important parts of HR. And I think the most important part of HR is focusing on the people inside the company,” Lo said.
As they grow, startups are also looking to integrate with tax agencies to automate their tax and regulatory filings, alleviating more headaches for businesses.
Lo first connected with Seye at École Polytechnique. After graduating, Lo worked briefly as a data scientist before switching to investment banking and joining French startup Skeat. This awakened his entrepreneurial spirit.
“I joined when I only had six months of cash left. So it was very complicated, but for me it was the best transition of my life. Because it helped me discover entrepreneurship, it helped me discover startups, it also helped me discover SaaS… As I thought about how I could help my community, it became clear that I needed to start something related to SaaS in Africa,” said Lo.
To date, Socium says it has more than 100 active customers across 10 industries and 15 countries, making it one of the few HR technologies in Africa to recently raise funding. Kenyan startup WorkPay, which reportedly serves more than 1,000 customers across 20 African countries, recently closed a $5 million Series A round led by Visa.
Socium’s seed round was led by Briga, and a number of angel investors including Patek, Orange Ventures, Tsui Ventures, Sonatel, Outliers, Super Capital, Ebolem, and TechMind also participated, and Razer Partners Became a financial advisor.
