Humi

Overview

Humi built the Canadian version of an all-in-one employment system: HR records, payroll, benefits, recruiting, performance, and time off in one product for small and midsize employers. Founded in Toronto in 2016, the company joined YC's Winter 2017 batch and grew into a national specialist while American suites and legacy payroll vendors fought over a much larger market.^[1]

The acquisition was the consequence of a sound wedge with a hard ceiling. Canadian payroll and benefits rules gave Humi a defensible local product, but maintaining that breadth for one country demanded more capital than a focused SaaS tool while offering less scale than a global platform. Employment Hero bought the local capability in 2025 in a deal estimated above CAD 100 million, then kept Humi as a supported product and Quebec-compliant option.^[2][3]

Founding Story

Kevin Kliman did not arrive through the standard payroll or enterprise-software route. He was a licensed dentist who had built small software businesses on the side. In a 2018 interview, he described Humi as his first technology startup and named the early functional team: Matt Loszak led technology, Simon Bourgeois ran operations, and Drew Millington led sales.^[4] Public material does not establish exactly how the group met, and later company records generally identify Kliman and Loszak as the founders.

The initial insight borrowed from Zenefits: use software to organize employee administration, then earn higher-value revenue from benefits brokerage. Kliman openly credited that model. Humi localized it for Canada, where smaller market size and provincial rules made US products less complete. He said, “In general we (Canada) are about four years behind the states when it comes to technology…mostly because we are 1/10th of the size.”^[4]

Humi began as a cloud employee-record system, but the founding vision widened. Payroll arrived through a merger with a team already building a web-based payroll application. Benefits brokerage gave the company both another product surface and a second revenue stream. Kliman summarized the product plainly: “Humi is cloud-based payroll, benefits, and HR software.”^[4]

That combination mattered. Canadian employers otherwise moved data between HR records, payroll providers, and insurance brokers, creating duplicate work and compliance risk. Humi's bet was that country-specific depth could outweigh the broader feature catalogs of US suites. Its progress through YC and into successive venture rounds suggests the wedge was real, even if the resulting business would eventually fit more naturally inside a global platform.

Timeline

• 2016: Humi was founded in Toronto as a Canadian HR software company.^[3]
• Winter 2017: Humi joined Y Combinator.^[1]
• 2018: The company had more than 30 employees, offered HR, payroll, and benefits, and was moving upmarket from 10–30 to 50–200 employee customers.^[4]
• June 2020: Humi announced CAD 15 million in equity and debt financing led by Tribe Capital and said it had served more than 4,000 Canadian companies.^[5]
• 2022: A CAD 31 million Series B, including CAD 25 million of equity and CAD 6 million of debt, took disclosed funding to CAD 51 million.^[6]
• January 2025: Employment Hero announced the acquisition, estimated above CAD 100 million.^[2]
• 2025–2026: Humi was rebranded under Employment Hero in Canada; the original product remained supported and retained a Quebec-specific role.^[3]

What They Built

Humi turned the employee lifecycle into a shared record. Administrators could add employees, handle onboarding documents, track positions and compensation, approve time off, run payroll, manage benefits, recruit, and conduct performance reviews. Employees could view their own records and benefits rather than routing every question through an HR manager.

Payroll was the difficult anchor. Canadian employers need tax calculations, remittances, bank connections, year-end forms, and province-specific treatment. Kliman called it “its own beast” because it had to connect to banks and was hard to build.^[4] Once payroll shared the same employee record as HR and benefits, a salary or status change no longer had to be entered across several vendors.