leave-management
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AbsenceSoft Turned HR's Worst Spreadsheet Into a 7-Million-Person Business
Leave is where employment law, private life and office bureaucracy collide. AbsenceSoft built a business by turning that collision into a workflow HR teams can actually run.
Mahima Chawla Turned Leave’s Paper Chase Into a Product People Could Trust
A colleague’s laptop-at-the-hospital story sent Mahima Chawla into the unlovely machinery of employee leave. Six years, 25,000-plus leaves and one acquisition later, her career offers a quiet lesson in building software for the moments when paperwork feels most personal.
Cocoon Turned Parental Leave's Fax-Machine Maze Into Software - Then TriNet Bought It for $23 Million
Three former Stripe and Square operators started with one customer, one state and one leave type. Five years later, Cocoon had supported 25,000 leaves, won 400-plus employers and sold to TriNet - a neat lesson in turning regulatory sludge into useful software.
palm.hr
palm.hr is a Riyadh-born, cloud-based HR and payroll platform built for small and mid-sized businesses across Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC. It brings employee data, time and attendance, WPS-compliant payroll, and employee engagement into one system that plugs directly into local government rails like GOSI and Mudad, so companies can run people operations that comply with regional labor law out of the box. Founded in 2019, it raised a $5M pre-Series A in 2023 to expand across MENA and pairs its software with an outsourced HR concierge service.
Bayzat
Reduce HR admin time, run payroll in minutes, streamline all your payments, and deliver world-class employee experiences - unified on one platform hyperlocalised for the GCC.
Workpay
Workpay is a Nairobi-based HR and payroll software company that helps local and global businesses hire, pay, and manage employees and contractors across Africa. Its cloud platform combines payroll processing, time and attendance, leave, expenses, benefits, and Employer of Record (EOR) services so companies can run compliant payroll in local currency without setting up a legal entity in each country. Founded in 2019 out of an earlier product called TozzaPlus, the Y Combinator-backed startup serves more than 1,000 companies and processes over $200 million in payroll value a year.
HReasily
HReasily is a Singapore-headquartered cloud HR and payroll platform that helps small and mid-sized businesses across Southeast Asia automate payroll, leave, claims, staff records and time-attendance in one place. Founded in 2015, it operates across six Asian markets and handles local statutory compliance so growing companies can run HR with less paperwork.
Keka HR
Keka HR is a cloud-based human resource, payroll and people-operations platform for small and mid-sized businesses. Founded in Hyderabad in 2014 by Vijay Yalamanchili, it bundles payroll, attendance, leave, performance, hiring and employee-engagement tools into a single self-serve system. After bootstrapping for years, Keka raised a $57 million Series A from WestBridge Capital in 2022 - reported as India's largest Series A in SaaS at the time - and now serves thousands of companies while processing payroll for more than a million employees each month.
Paismo
Paismo is a people-first, AI-powered HR and payroll platform built for small and mid-sized businesses in emerging markets. Founded in 2022 by University of Pennsylvania alumni Rebecka Zavaleta and Usama Mahmud, it combines core HR, time and attendance, leave, performance management and automated payroll into one cloud system - with localized features designed from the ground up for markets that legacy HR software has long ignored. Backed by a $1.5M seed haul led by Indus Valley Capital, Paismo now spans the US, UAE, Pakistan, Mexico and Ethiopia, and has layered on Employer of Record services and a one-click payroll partnership with easypaisa.
Sparrow
Sparrow is a San Francisco-based HR tech company that takes the pain out of employee leave - parental, medical, caregiver, ADA - by automating the federal, state, and local filings while pairing every leave with a human specialist. Founded in 2018 by Deborah Hanus and Marek Sotak, Sparrow now serves more than 1,000 employers including OpenAI, Reddit, and Oura.
Deborah Hanus
Deborah Hanus is the co-founder and CEO of Sparrow, a San Francisco-based HR technology company that combines AI automation with human expertise to manage employee leave. Armed with degrees from MIT (BS in Computer Science and Brain & Cognitive Sciences, MEng in EECS) and a Harvard PhD in Computer Science & Machine Learning, she left academia after watching six close friends struggle through the leave process and built the company from scratch as a solo founder. Sparrow has raised $55M in total funding (Series B led by Silver Lake Waterman in July 2025), serves 1,000+ companies including OpenAI and Reddit, and has saved customers over $350 million in payroll costs.