Humand

AI HR for deskless workers

March 9th, 2026

The major players in HR tooling are building for office workers; Humand is building for everyone else.

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Ethan and Arek🦄

  • Sunday, March 15 (Austin): We’re hosting an emerging managers + founding GPs dinner for 25 VCs at SXSW with Mercury and Sydecar. RSVP here.

Humand is an all-in-one platform that combines internal communication, HR management, operations, talent development, and company culture tools.

Unlike many HR tools that are built primarily for office environments, Humand is designed for deskless workers, such as teams working in factories, retail stores, hospitals, construction sites, and field operations. Users do not need a corporate email address to access the system, bypassing one of the main points of friction with HR tools.

The product is organized into 30 modular features, each designed to handle a specific workplace task. Organizations can manage activities such as company announcements, internal chat, digital social feeds, onboarding workflows, training programs, performance reviews, time-off requests, employee records, and more. Together, they cover the full employee lifecycle, from recruitment and onboarding through daily operations and employee engagement.

Humand also includes an AI assistant called Sammy. It answers internal questions about company policies and processes, automating routine requests that would otherwise require HR intervention.

Check it out: humand.co

Humand operates as a B2B SaaS platform. The product is available as a modular structure that allows organizations to start small and add more modules as their needs evolve.

  • Announced a $66 million Series A on Feb. 23, 2026, co-led by Kaszek and Goodwater Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and technology founders such as Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, Lyft co-founder Rajat Suri, and Mercado Libre founder Marcos Galperin

  • Took part in the Y Combinator W22 batch

  • Signed a deal with OXXO, one of the largest companies in Latin America with over 140,000 employees, in September 2023, in addition to signing deals with other companies 

  • River Plate, one of Argentina’s most successful soccer clubs, joined as a client in 2024

  • Used by 1,500+ companies and 1.6 million employees around the world, with clients including Siemens, Domino’s, and The Home Depot

Humand founders Nicolas Benenzon and Geronimo Maspero met while studying at the Buenos Aires Institute of Technology. Their interest in building technology companies grew after attending a talk by Marcos Galperin, founder of Mercado Libre, the largest e-commerce and fintech platform in Latin America, a combination of Amazon and PayPal. 

In 2018, the team participated in JPMorgan Chase’s Code for Good, a global hackathon where developers build technology solutions for nonprofits. Their project, an internal social network designed to help NGOs connect with job opportunities and talent, won the competition.

The app quickly started drawing attention to the duo behind it. In 2019, the Chief HR Officer of ArcelorMittal Acindar, a major steel producer in Argentina, invited the team to propose and build a solution for improving internal communication at one of its plants.

While working on this project, Benenzon and Maspero noticed a recurring problem: companies with large frontline workforces (such as warehouse staff and factory operators) struggled to communicate digitally with their employees working outside office environments. 

For these deskless workers, paper processes, notice boards, and outdated systems that hadn’t been updated in years were still the primary way of communicating. 

ArcelorMittal Acindar gave the team 20 days to build a working prototype. The first version launched as a pilot with 200 employees. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of the platform, and it became the primary communication channel for more than 3,000 employees.

The team applied to Y Combinator twice, once in 2020 and again in 2021, but both applications were rejected. The feedback they received was to return once they had more customers and a clearer, scalable model.

In Winter 2022, Humand was accepted into Y Combinator and raised its first funding round of $2.5 million, backed in part by the founders of companies like Dropbox and Lyft. Since then, Humand has expanded to large enterprise clients across multiple industries, including organizations with workforces exceeding 100,000 employees like Siemens, one of the world’s largest German industrial technology companies.

Roy Anderson is an employee at the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin in The Office. He works on the warehouse floor under Darryl Philbin.

Unlike Jim Halpert, Dwight Schrute, and Stanley Hudson, Roy’s work doesn’t revolve around emails and meetings. He spends his time on the warehouse floor, where he loads trucks and fulfills shipments. It’s easy to imagine obstacles in his daily routine.

He arrives at work but doesn’t have a [email protected] email address. Updates from the company are posted on bulletin boards or shared through face-to-face interactions. There’s perhaps a computer, but it’s running an old system that crashes frequently. Time off and many other requests are filled out on paper. Training and other updates usually come as cascaded information from his boss, Darryl.

For many workers, this TV series dynamic is not an exaggeration. It actually reflects reality. 

An estimated 80% of the global workforce is deskless, working in factories, retail stores, hospitals, construction sites, and logistics operations. These deskless workers are responsible for much of the daily operations of companies, but they have had limited access to digital systems. 

44% of deskless workers say they expect better tools and technology to make their work easier, according to HFS Research. The same research indicates that 61% of organizations are moving toward unified digital workplace platforms. Together, these numbers show why companies are increasingly looking for solutions that can better connect and support all their employees. 

This change comes with, of course, several challenges. One of them is that much of enterprise software was designed with a specific type of employee in mind: the one sitting behind a desk with a computer. Think Slack, ClickUp, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and many more.

Humand positions itself around this gap. The all-in-one platform is designed as a mobile-first workplace system that connects frontline workers directly to company communication and HR processes.

The platform itself is comprehensive, offering modules that focus on a number of key administrative functions. 

An example of Humand’s onboarding workflow, where employees receive tasks and reminders directly in the app.

For example, the internal communication module includes live streaming, internal chat, digital magazines, knowledge libraries, benefits announcements, and even an internal social network for company updates. This, and all other modules, help organizations keep frontline employees informed, avoiding fragmented and disconnected information. 

One other function is the company’s AI assistant, Sammy. For employees, Sammy can retrieve information or complete simple tasks quickly. For companies, it reduces support tickets and repetitive administrative work. Humand reports that the assistant can save up to two hours per employee per day by automating these common interactions.

By consolidating these functions into a single easy-to-use application, Humand aims to replace the combination of disconnected spreadsheets and outdated intranets that many companies still rely on.

The market opportunity is significant. There are 2.7 billion people globally operating outside traditional office environments, and, as mentioned, many organizations are still transitioning away from paper-based processes and fragmented software systems. Humand demonstrates traction, with millions of workers using the platform across thousands of companies in more than 40 industries, and offices in San Francisco, New York, London, and 11 cities worldwide.

Looking ahead, Humand plans to expand further into the U.S. market while continuing to grow across the more than 50 countries where its customers operate. 

As CTO and co-founder Geronimo Maspero puts it, the vision is straightforward:

This includes, of course, the warehouse floor. 

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