User:Vipul/Zenefits

Zenefits is a company based in the United States that offers cloud-based software as a service to companies for managing their human resources, with a particular focus on helping them with health insurance coverage.

History
Zenefits was started by Parker Conrad, who had been co-founder of Wikinvest and a software engineer at Sigfig, and Laks Srini, Conrad's colleague at Sigfig, to help startups and small businesses find insurance quotes and manage employee benefits in one place. It was part of the Winter 2013 batch of startup accelerator Y Combinator, and officially launched on February 18, 2013.

In October 2013, Zenefits, that had so far been operational only in California and New York states, announced that it was rolling out to the other 48 states in the United States, albeit only for businesses with more than 20 employees. In January 2014, the company announced the addition of commuter spending, flexible spending, and 401(k) support in an attempt to replace the more mundane functions currently handled by companies' human resources departments.

In July 2014, the company announced support for stock options in its cloud HR platform.

In November 2014, Zenefits opened an office in Scottsdale, Arizona, where they plan to hire 1300 employees over the coming 3 years.

In December 2014, David Sacks, founder of collaboration service Yammer that had been sold to Microsoft, joined Zenefits as the Chief Operating Officer.

In January 2015, Zenefits announced that it had revenue of approximately $20 million in 2014, twenty times the corresponding figure in 2013, despite offering its platform to users for free and making all its money from commissions charged to insurers for being the insurance broker.

Funding
Zenefits was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2013 batch. In July 2013, Zenefits announced the completion of a seed round, led by, was led by Venrock and Maverick Capital, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Yuri Milner, General Catalyst Partners, Garry Tan, Justin Kan and Alexis Ohanian. The round also included angel investments from Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie, Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever, former Googler and Twitter VP of Corporate Strategy Elad Gil, Weebly co-founder David Rusenko, former Googler and Badoo COO Ben Ling, Google’s Head of Spam Slamming Matt Cutts and Inkling co-founder and CEO, Matt MacInnis. Including the company's initial $372K raised from Y Combinator, the company's total funding to date was $2.1 million.

The company raised its Series A in January 2014, about nine months after graduating from Y Combinator. The $15 million round included investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Maverick Capital and Venrock, and was aimed at helping Zenefits go after larger customers around the world and become the one-stop solution for Human Resources for their client companies. The round was also accompanied by the addition of Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Lars Dalgaard, the former CEO and founder of SuccessFactors, to the Zenefits board of directors.

The company raised a $66.5 million Series B, announced on June 3, 2014, from return investor Andreessen Horowitz and new investor Institutional Venture Partners, at a $500 million valuation.

Reception of rapid growth
Zenefits has been identified as one of the fastest growing software as a service companies in history. Its revenue growth rate has been compared favorably with such heavyweights as Workday and Salesforce, while its valuation growth was also noted by Forbes as being among the highest in 2014. The Wall Street Journal has discussed the rapid growth in Zenefits' own workforce as it scales to cope witha growing clientele.

The New York Times has noted that Zenefits' rapid pace of growth puts a lot of pressure on the company, and cited Zenefits co-founder and CEO Parker Conrad as saying that problems that other companies have a year to solve need to be solved by Zenefits within eight weeks. Forbes staff writer Brian Solomon noted how Zenefits had beaten Airbnb and Uber to become the hottest startup of 2014.