Building the operating system for the 2.7 billion workers who never sit at a desk - and just raised $66M to prove it can be done from Argentina.
The warehouse worker clocking in at 5am. The Domino's driver between deliveries. The retail associate at MINISO with no corporate email, no desktop, no seat at the digital table. For most of software history, they were an afterthought - communicated to by bulletin board, rumor, and the occasional all-staff email that bounced.
Nicolas Benenzon spotted this gap when he was barely old enough to vote. His uncle, a former CHRO of McDonald's Latin America & Caribbean, described the problem plainly: a frontline employee files a request with their local manager. It escalates to an HR help desk. Two weeks later, maybe they hear back. Meanwhile, everyone has a smartphone in their pocket.
That conversation seeded what would become Humand - an all-in-one mobile platform for internal communication, HR management, training, and employee services, purpose-built for workers who are never in front of a computer. It's the platform Microsoft never built, for the 80% of the world's workforce that Microsoft Office forgot.
By February 2026, Humand had 2 million users across 2,000+ organizations in 51 countries, a $66 million Series A co-led by Kaszek and Goodwater Capital, and backing from the founders of Dropbox, Vercel, MercadoLibre, Lyft, and Webflow. Nasdaq called it the largest Series A in Latin American HR tech history.
"Microsoft built the global software standard for companies with desk workers. We are building the global software standard for the 80% of the world's workforce who were never in front of a computer."
- Nicolas Benenzon, CEO & Co-founder, Humand
In 2016, two engineering students at the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires attended a lecture by Marcos Galperin, the founder of MercadoLibre. When it ended, they did something that would define the next decade of their lives - they followed Galperin to his car and spent hours asking him questions.
That's the origin story. Not a startup weekend. Not a pivot from a failed app. Two young Argentines who were hungry enough to chase an icon to a parking lot, curious enough to ask hard questions, and sharp enough to learn from the answers. Years later, Galperin would cut them a check.
Nicolas Benenzon and Gerónimo Maspero spent the next few years building up skills. They ran TechTrek, tripling its fundraising. They co-founded evenClick, an event-planning marketplace. They organized a 200-person tech conference with speakers from Microsoft, IBM, and Google. They were laying groundwork, even if they didn't know yet for what.
The insight came from Benenzon's uncle, the former HR chief of McDonald's Latin America. He painted a picture that stuck: tens of thousands of frontline employees, each one with a smartphone, but no digital bridge to their employer. A vacation request taking two weeks. A policy update arriving by printed flyer. The technological gap between what companies used to manage office workers and what existed for their operational workforce was decades wide.
Benenzon and Maspero saw it clearly. The problem was enormous. The solution was mobile. The timing was right.
In 2019, they got their first real test. ArcelorMittal Acindar - one of the world's largest steel producers - invited them to compete for a bid to improve internal communication at a struggling plant. They had no formal company. They had 20 days. They had two laptops and an idea.
They built an internal social network with a ticketing system. They beat Facebook Workplace. They beat Microsoft Yammer. They won the contract and secured the intellectual property rights to what they had built.
ArcelorMittal became Humand's first customer. Then COVID hit in early 2020, and Humand's platform became the sole digital channel for over 3,000 ArcelorMittal employees overnight. What might have been a slow rollout became an emergency deployment - and the product proved itself under pressure.
The rest moved fast. Mexico in 2021. Y Combinator in 2022. $2.5 million seed. More contracts, more countries, more workers. By 2026, MINISO, Domino's, OXXO, Tenaris, NSG Group, and 2,000 other organizations had brought Humand inside their walls. The $66 million Series A landed in February of that year - backed by some of Silicon Valley's most recognizable names, all writing checks for a platform built by two kids from Buenos Aires who once chased a billionaire to a parking lot.
"Our goal is very simple: We want to become the default operating system for companies with deskless workers."
- Nicolas Benenzon, on Humand's mission
After Marcos Galperin finished his lecture at ITBA, most students filed out. Benenzon and Maspero followed him to his car. They spent hours there, asking questions about entrepreneurship, building companies, and what it takes to compete globally. Galperin apparently didn't mind. Years later, when Humand went out to raise its Series A, Galperin was in the round.
When ArcelorMittal Acindar's HR Director invited them to bid on improving internal communication at one of its plants, Benenzon and Maspero had no formal company - just the idea and the code. They had 20 days. They built an internal social network with a ticketing system from scratch and submitted it against established corporate platforms. The judges chose them. ArcelorMittal became Humand's founding client and stayed.
In early 2020, COVID-19 locked down Argentina. For ArcelorMittal's 3,000+ employees, Humand suddenly wasn't a nice-to-have - it was the only way to communicate with the company. No bulletin board. No office. No email. Just the app. Humand held. And the crisis proved the product worked exactly where it was designed to work: for the workers nobody else had designed for.
The original spark wasn't a product insight or a market analysis. It was a dinner conversation. Nicolas's uncle, who had run HR for McDonald's Latin America & Caribbean, explained what it was like to manage communication for tens of thousands of operational workers without corporate emails or desktop computers. A simple request could take two weeks to resolve through the chain of managers and help desks. Benenzon heard it and asked why. Nobody had a good answer. That's when he started building one.
"Va a cambiar todo. Será como internet." - AI will change everything. It will be like the internet.
"We started with a simple goal: to help people be happy and successful at work. The scale has grown, but that purpose remains unchanged."
"We are inspired to demonstrate that a startup born in Latin America can compete equally with international giants."
"Our goal is very simple: We want to become the default operating system for companies with deskless workers."
Benenzon splits his time between Argentina, Mexico, the United States, Europe, and Asia - roughly two months a year back home. His advice to young founders: find a problem you genuinely care about, build a team with aligned ambitions, and plan for the long term. He counsels against chasing trends. The 2.7 billion deskless workers weren't a trend when he started. They were just overlooked.
The $66 million is not a destination. It's fuel. Benenzon has been explicit about what Humand is building toward: the default operating system for companies with deskless workers - a platform as fundamental to the operational workforce as Microsoft Office became for the knowledge economy.
The AI roadmap is central to this vision. Humand's platform already incorporates AI agents that automate onboarding, handle employee requests via natural language, route workflows, and surface analytics. Benenzon believes AI will be as transformative for workplace software as the internet itself - "Va a cambiar todo. Será como internet."
The geographic expansion is global. With 51 countries already on the map and the Series A capital behind them, Humand is pushing into North America, Europe, and Asia more aggressively, while deepening its presence across Latin America where it already has significant enterprise traction.
Marcos Galperin, the billionaire founder of MercadoLibre, invested in Humand after Benenzon first chased him to a parking lot as a student.
Humand is mobile-first - designed for workers who access it on smartphones between shifts, not from corporate desks.
Benenzon spends roughly two months per year in Argentina, splitting the rest between Mexico, the US, Europe, and Asia.
His GitHub profile (nicolasbenenzon) reflects engineering roots he keeps sharp despite growing into a full-time CEO role.
"We started with a simple goal: to help people be happy and successful at work. The scale has grown, but that purpose remains unchanged."
- Nicolas Benenzon, on Humand's founding purpose