Trying to find answers to HR-related questions can be a time-consuming and stressful process for employees.
A Seattle-based startup is using artificial intelligence to help.
Cascade AI announced a $3.75 million seed round led by Gradient, Google’s AI-focused early stage venture fund.
The startup has developed an AI assistant that can answer HR questions from employees related to benefits, bonuses, leave, retirement, internal conflicts, return to work policies, and more. The bot is trained on a company’s HR policies.
Cascade is automating more than 50% of HR support operations for its customers, said Ana-Maria Constantin, the company’s CEO and co-founder.
“From an HR team standpoint, this is unlocking very significant productivity gains,” she said.
The assistant can act as a “first line of defense,” Constantin said, especially for confidential questions that employees may not be comfortable asking to an HR colleague related to topics such as pregnancy or retirement.
“It’s been really great for employees in navigating complex, sensitive situations,” she said.
The assistant knows certain information about who is asking the question, so it can tailor answers based on job title or location, for example.
The system will escalate requests if the assistant is not able to access relevant information.
Companies are not able to see employee-specific queries, but they can access aggregate data that spotlights HR trends within a workforce.
Constantin said the startup is exploring ways to bolster the bot so it can perform tasks for users, not just answer questions.
Cascade generates revenue with a per-employee-per-month pricing structure. The company declined to share revenue metrics.
Cascade is working with organizations that have more than 1,000 employees. Customers range from industries including tech, energy, and healthcare.
The company was previously known as Cascade Health, which was building software to help make healthcare pricing information more transparent. But it soon realized that there were substantial quality issues with publicly available health transparency data.
It pivoted to the Cascade AI after hearing from HR teams about complexity with benefits information.
The company previously raised a $1.75 million pre-seed round.
Constantin and Cascade co-founder Pulak Goyal both attended Harvard and worked at Microsoft before launching Cascade.
Constantin, who earned degrees in computer science and astrophysics, won Young Entrepreneur of the Year honors at the GeekWire Awards last year.
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