In this pitch, Carolyn Peer, CEO and co‑founder of Humaxa, presents an employee‑retention chatbot called DevFRED designed for remote workforces. She frames the problem as massive turnover costs (e.g., $160 billion in 2017) and the failure of existing survey‑based tools. DevFRED is positioned as a fun, real‑time conversational assistant that gathers authentic feedback, offers personalized solutions (e.g., mentorship, stress mitigation, training), and surfaces insights via a data‑science‑driven dashboard. A live demo shows a finance employee seeking a software‑development path, with the bot arranging mentorship. Peer shares beta results: three private‑beta clients, engagement 25‑50 % above typical surveys, $1.21 M ARR in contract talks, ~720 prospects, and a goal of 10 customers/1,000 users by year‑end. The go‑to‑market plan starts in tech, then expands to manufacturing, healthcare, etc., with a vision of an open API platform that can integrate external services (e.g., Adobe certification). The company’s team includes Peer (17 years HR‑tech experience, former ADP employee) and co‑founders Guillermo Borges and Gary Saperstein. Funding ask: $1.2 M to achieve 20 % month‑over‑month growth and $7.8 M ARR by end‑2021. In the Q&A, Peer discusses handling stress/burnout, the platform’s horizontal API approach, and emphasizes that the technology facilitates human‑to‑human connections rather than replacing humans. The pitch concludes with a call for investment and a link to humaxa.com.
Chapters
So, hi everyone. My name is Carolyn Peer. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Humaxa. We have developed the employee retention chatbot built specifically for the remote workforce by industry experts. Today's workers expect to work flexibly and change jobs frequently. The world has changed and employees are no longer loyal like they used to be. According to a recent study, nearly half of the millennials in the workforce today plan to leave their jobs within 2 years. But losing employees kills companies. Even losing one key employee at just the wrong time can be catastrophic. So how well do people know what will make employees want to stay engage, and perform. According to a study by Berson by Deloitte, this cost $160 billion in just 2017. So we know this is a huge problem, but there's a ton of employee retention tools in the market today. During my 17 years of experience in the HR tech industry, what I've noticed is they simply don't work. They depend on boring surveys. They cannot automate the employee retention and performance process, and they take forever to see results. So let's replace these broken tools. Let's engage employees with a fun and meaningful chatbot assistant that makes retention and performance mindlessly easy. Let's turn 8 weeks of work into just 8 seconds. There's no more waiting for data or reports because all the data is a live feed. There's no obligatory meetings necessary and no laborious action plans. Let me show you how this works. Please meet Dev Fred. Dev Fred is our chatbot assistant. And by the way, this is a real example. So in this example, I'm playing the role of someone who works in finance, and I'm very technical, and I'm interested in finding out what it would take to become a software developer. And unfortunately, my manager has not been able to support my investigating these new career roles. Instead of having to wait for a survey to show up, I simply reach out to Doug Fred and tell him I want to provide workplace feedback about professional development. And he says, "Oh, hey, Carolyn. You know, I feel that bots need to have lots of opportunities to develop and grow professionally. But what about you?" "Hey, how do you feel about the professional development that you receive at work?" And I tell him, "It's very frustrating and I'm disappointed. I've tried to talk to my manager many times about seeing what it's like to work as a software engineer, but nothing ever happens." He recognizes this and offers to set me up with a mentor who can tell me a lot more about what it's like as a software developer. Just one example. Our beta users are loving us. In one example, I had someone reach out a couple of weeks ago and say, "Hey, Carolyn, our internal review today went great. My head of HR is extremely excited about what you were doing. Thank you." And another kind of funny example, one of our users wanted to invite our chatbot to their wedding. But of course, we're more than just a chatbot. On the backend, we're using data science to drive our dashboards, control panel, suggested activities engine, and insights. But our vision for the future is an open platform where we make our APIs public. For example, if the workforce is interested in getting certified in Adobe Photoshop, DevFRED could reach out directly with Adobe and arrange that training for them. We've recruited an all-star team, myself, With 17 years of experience in the industry, I was an early employee at the HR tech startup called ProBusiness. We were acquired by ADP in 2003. I left ADP in 2017, joined by my two co-founders, Guillermo Borges and Gary Saperstein, both technical, to found Humaxa. Because we're opening up our platform and making our APIs public in the future, we see ourselves as a uniting force in this fractured and competitive landscape out there. We sit at the intersection of action and insights. This SaaS market is huge. We've started with the tech sector, planning to move on to manufacturing, healthcare, and beyond. And we've been able to do a lot with a little. We launched our private beta program about a year ago with 3 clients. We're seeing terrific results with those 3 clients. Product engagement is 25 to 50% above the average of any type of employee survey out there today. And we're projecting to reach at least 10 customers and 1,000 users by the end of this year. We're going to market with $1.21 million ARR in contract talks today and another 720 prospects who have indicated interest. So join us. Let's transform the employee-employer relationship forever. We're raising $1.2 million to reach at least 20% month-over-month growth rate and at least $7.8 million ARR by the end of 2021. There's also been a couple of high-profile exits in our space with Qualtrics and Glint, just some examples of what can happen in this space. So thank you very much. My name is Carolyn Peer and we are Humaxa. I'd love to hear your questions.
Amazing. Thanks, Carolyn. So, you know, why are you doing this?
You know, in all those years where I worked in HR tech, first for the startup and then for a big— as a leader within a Fortune 250 company, on one side of my ear, I was hearing our clients complain about being able to hang on to their top talent and always having to send people to our training programs to learn how to implement software. And I would see the same clients over and over and over again. And they would say things like, "Caroline, you're in HR tech. Can't you help us? You have so much data. You ought to be able to help us." And then, on the other side of my ear, I'm hearing from my own teams and my own employees say things like, "Hey, Caroline, do we really have to take this employee engagement survey? Can I just put all 5s? Because nothing ever happens anyway, and we don't want to do a whole bunch of extra work." And seeing these two sides, I thought, you know what, this system is completely broken. There's this tremendous opportunity here. And granted, it's a difficult problem to solve, but somebody needs to solve it. And that would be me. Yeah.
And why do you think the time is now for Humaxa?
Well, as I alluded to earlier, the workforce has changed. People are not, you know, employees are no longer loyal like they used to be. But there's another factor too, I think, here is What we're doing is, you know, if you have a smart refrigerator and it tells you that you need a gallon of milk, maybe Amazon can deliver the gallon of milk and make this process really easy. But this is human beings we're talking about. The human capital within an organization is the most expensive and the most valuable thing. And yet, the tools and the systems that are in place today are antiquated and they're not working. So, as the workforce has become less loyal and, you know, very flighty, easy to move on to a new job, the technology hasn't caught up. And in the HR tech world, I saw this working in it for so long. And, you know, it just, it needs to catch up with the way that the workforce has changed. That's why we need to do something about it now.
There's a question in the chat room from Magdalena, who's also a Founder Institute grad out of Belo Horizonte. She says, congratulations. She's— her question is, is, you know, how— if you're considering factors such as, you know, work stress and burnout in the product development roadmap.
Yes, absolutely. You know, I chose that one example of— which was a real-life example of a young person in finance who wanted to find out what it would be like to work in software engineering. But one of our strongest use cases we've seen is the chatbot assistant will ask people about stress and it will try to get to the root of the problem. "Hey, Carolyn, do you feel stressed out at work? Do you feel like you have the resources that you need to mitigate stress?" And if I say, "No, I really don't," the chatbot will try to start offering up solutions. "Hey, would you like to get to your coworkers?" and maybe share some tactics they've been using to mitigate stress. Or if the stress is related to my workload, it will offer to give anonymous feedback to leadership or management saying, "Hey, guess what? People are stressed out because of their workload," and try to do something about it. And what we're seeing is that people are much more likely to provide authentic feedback when the chatbot assistant is going to try to take action and make it better.
Luciano asked the question around if you could possibly clarify how or if the chatbot is a vertical solution versus like an open platform with an API, essentially kind of like a more horizontal one.
So the key to our technology is being able to get this authentic feedback and really get to the essence of what is making people, what is driving people to engage and perform on the job. This is based on my academic background and research in cognitive neuroscience. That's what's really, that's the core of our technology. So the solutions that it offers up today are, you know, there's only a handful of solutions. The platform nature of where we want to go is to be able to offer up hundreds of different solutions. We don't necessarily have the best recognition system, for example. But if an organization wants to open up and make that a solution, then we can offer up the best products out there, the best solutions out there. We see that being hundreds of different solutions. So, our tech is the matching of the how people are feeling and what the solution is to solve their problems. Does it help? I think I answered.
Yeah. And, you know, another question here is how do you compensate the human touch from the employee perspective?
Compensate the human touch?
Yeah. I'm reading into this question, but if I was to elaborate is, you know, how do you basically You may not be replacing maybe humans here, but how do you kind of, you know, bridge that gap between like human and AI kind of?
Yeah, we don't see ourselves replacing human beings at all. We're facilitating the connection between human beings in many cases. In the example that I gave, you know, this young person working in finance who wanted to find out about being a software engineer. Their manager, I'm sure it wasn't malicious. You know, the manager wasn't trying to prevent them from finding this out. The manager probably just had too many other things on their plate, too many balls in the air, didn't have enough time to, or, you know, just keeping everything going. Here, our technology was able to make that connection, but ultimately the connection was between human beings. It wasn't between the person and the, the technology. The technology was simply the facilitator of that human connection.
And final question here, you know, from, from Shang. He's asking a question essentially around, you know, how are you, how are you basically, how is your product keeping employees engaged? I mean, you talked a little bit about surveys and things like that. You know, can you elaborate a little bit more about how UMAXA like improves this?
Sure, I think so. So one of the things that we're seeing in all the data that we've been collecting so far is that what makes one person engaged and perform is very different from another person. What's important to one person may not be important to another person at all. Maybe one person, they really want to have workplace friendships and be able to get together with their buddies during, I don't know, after work to, you know, I don't know, go out to dinner. But someone else is extremely ambitious and they want to learn more about to become an industry leader or a thought leader in their space. And somebody else wants to get really good at software engineering, maybe the backend, or they want to become a backend engineer, and maybe they only know the frontend. So what we're finding is it's really different for each and every person. The power of our technology is it figures that out. It starts learning what's important to each individual person so that person feels the value in providing all this feedback. And then on the administrative side, you can direct your attention to the places that require the most immediate attention in order to engage and help your people be the best person that they can be on the job.
Terrific. Thank you so much for presenting your company for everyone in the chat room. If you'd like to learn more, take a look at humaxa.com.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Carolyn. I appreciate your time.
