Enough capital to go public: Personio is worth $8.5 billion

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IPO in sight:

"We will certainly be able to do this in 2024 or 2025," says Personio CEO

Photo:

Juan Serrano Corbella

(32)

has never hidden his ambitions .

He believes that the start-up Personio, which he co-founded, could become Europe's largest software company.

The CEO wants to revolutionize human resource management in companies and shape the next SAP along the way.

"We want to build a company that can exist for decades," he says.

He now has enough capital for this.

While large parts of the start-up and tech world go into crisis mode, Renner has been able to raise fresh money.

The investors, led by the previous financier Greenoaks Capital from the USA, are giving him a further 200 million dollars.

The valuation rises to 8.5 billion euros;

at the last round in October it was still at $ 6.3 billion.

This makes Personio one of the most valuable start-ups in Europe.

In Germany, only the software company Celonis (around 11 billion dollars) and the neobank N26 (around 9 billion) have been valued higher.

In view of the massive devaluation of even large tech companies on the stock exchanges, there have recently been significant cuts among start-ups.

Even highly rated companies like Klarna are said to be valued at only a third of last year's sums, and a number of young companies have announced mass layoffs.

The hype of the past few years, when founding teams could pocket millions with mere PowerPoint slides, is largely over.

"This time it was about different questions than in previous rounds of financing," says Renner.

"Investors wanted to know much more precisely whether the business could still be relevant in ten years. Such considerations were less important in the market recently. But that's good for us now."

Personio, founded in Munich in 2015, uses its software to automate the various systems in recruiting, personnel administration and payroll accounting, especially in smaller companies.

Renner now has well over 6,000 companies among its customers, and sales have doubled since the last round of financing to a three-digit million figure.

Renner and his two co -founders

(31) and

(30) invest heavily in growth, hire around 80 new people a month, expand abroad and recently took over a software provider, Back.

Personio is not currently making any profits, but Renner says: "We could slow down at any time and thus become profitable very quickly if it were appropriate."

He is not worried about an impending downturn: "We have a stable business model. We will be able to continue to grow strongly even in a possible recession. There are no signs that we should not continue to double our sales every year."

Even in the first months of Corona, the churn rate did not increase.

He therefore had to make concessions such as additional promises of interest to investors, as is now the norm with other start-ups.

But even at Personio, the rating "only" rose by almost 35 percent - the multiple on the doubled sales has therefore fallen.

With the new capital, Renner now wants to push ahead with the development of the next software generation "People Workflow Automation" as well as expansion abroad, especially in Great Britain, Spain and the Netherlands.

However, with around three quarters of sales, the majority of the business still comes from Germany - and that will remain the case for the time being: Of the around 1.7 million companies in Europe that Renner has identified as a potential target group, 400,000 come from Germany.

The founders now own a little less than 20 percent of the company, and the employees hold another 15 percent.

They do not want to sell, but despite the currently difficult market situation, Renner formulates the next steps: "It is not at all illusory to talk about an IPO: We will definitely go public. Not next year, but we will definitely be in 2024 or 2025 be able to do that when the environment is right."

With

(43), he already has the right CFO on board to prepare the company for this;

he poached her from Zalando in the same role.

The people of Munich don't have to rush it, there seems to be enough money.

Even before the current financing, a clearly three-digit amount of the previously collected around 570 million dollars was still in the company account, according to Renner.

The 200 million dollars are now on top of that.

"The financing will definitely be enough to go public, we don't need any more capital for the time being and we don't have any pressure from investors."

Not many founders can claim that in these times.