Kombo

Every company that sells software to HR, recruiting or payroll teams eventually hits the same wall. Customers ask, "Does it connect to Personio? To Workday? To BambooHR? To our ATS?" Each answer means another integration to build, another API to learn, another connector to keep alive as the underlying system changes. The backlog never ends.

Kombo, founded in Berlin in 2022, turns that backlog into a single API call. A company integrates Kombo once and can then offer its customers off-the-shelf connections to hundreds of HR information systems (HRIS), applicant tracking systems (ATS), payroll platforms, assessment tools and learning management systems (LMS). Kombo handles the authentication, the data normalization and the ongoing maintenance.

The clever part is the shared data model. Reading employees, employments and absences - or writing back time-off requests, documents and employee updates - works the same whether the customer is on Paycor, Oracle HCM, Personio or BambooHR. Same endpoints, same fields, same format. The differences between systems are Kombo's problem, not its customers'.

That is why most people who touch software powered by Kombo have never heard of it. It runs invisibly behind hiring tools and HR apps, moving people data from one system to another. The best infrastructure tends to disappear.

Kombo's customers are other software companies - mostly B2B SaaS and HR tech vendors across Europe and North America. They embed Kombo so their own users can plug into whatever HR system they already run. The problem Kombo removes is concrete: engineering time spent building connectors instead of product, sales cycles stalled on "do you integrate with X?", and the slow grind of maintaining integrations that break when a vendor changes its API.

The named roster spans hiring, payroll and benefits: Indeed, Paychex, HireVue, Gem, Thatch, Mercor, Juicebox, Edenred, Experian, Factorial, Leapsome, Pleo, TestGorilla, CV-Library and Clear Company, among others. Instead of manually integrating 250-plus systems, each of them implements Kombo once and gets the portfolio.

Kombo is a straightforward B2B SaaS business: software vendors subscribe to its unified API and pay to offer their end users off-the-shelf connections, while Kombo handles normalization, authentication, maintenance and support - the last delivered hands-on through dedicated Slack channels. The value proposition is time reclaimed and deals unblocked.

The market underneath is large and unglamorous. Investors peg the workforce technology market at more than $40 billion today, with projections passing $100 billion by 2030. Kombo's ambition is to be the layer that moves data reliably across all of it - and, increasingly, to make that people data clean and normalized enough for AI agents to act on. That is the thesis behind its 2026 Series A.