leave-management
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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.
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.