Growth, progress, and expansion: Leapsome’s 2022 in review

Defined by the war in Ukraine and its far-reaching geo-political, humanitarian, and economic impact, 2022 was not the post-pandemic year the world hoped for. We felt the consequences of this conflict in almost all areas of global society — including the world of work. 

Faced with a higher cost of living, rising interest rates, and a relentlessly negative news cycle, employees focused on matters within their control, such as where and how they work, who they work for, and the space work takes up within their lives.

In 2022, we helped 1500 forward-thinking businesses worldwide make work more fulfilling for their teams through transparent, flexible, and measurable people enablement processes. Driven by this mission, we continued to nurture a fulfilling workplace culture at Leapsome. 

Despite the global environment, 2022 was a milestone year for Leapsome, marked by growth, progress, and expansion. Our sights are now set on the year ahead, but first, let’s look back at some highlights of 2022.

Our US$60 million Series A led by Insight Partners

Following five years of practical and profitable bootstrapping, we secured and announced our first round of external investment in March. With a US$60-million Series A funding round from leading software investors Insight Partners (USA), alongside Creandum (Sweden) and Visionaries Club (Germany), we publicly set our intention to accelerate Leapsome’s international growth and the development of our people enablement platform.

The guidance, expertise, and investment from Insight Partners fueled many of our expansion activities in 2022. Most important to us was ensuring that growth would be sustainable, long-lasting, supporting our internal culture, and helping us serve our growing customer base.

Tripling the Leapsome team

Heightened focus on recruiting resulted in growth across all teams and departments in 2022. The global Leapsome team now numbers 150 — meaning we tripled our total headcount in only a year! Rest assured, we grew intentionally and sensibly, and will continue to focus on sustainable and efficient growth going forward. Our team today comprises over 20 different nationalities, and diverse (and fascinating!) academic and professional backgrounds, ranging from experienced leaders to dynamic fresh graduates.

Though we pride ourselves on ambitious growth targets, we will never compromise on the quality of the people we hire at Leapsome. The People & Culture team trained and aligned all interviewers on common expectations and what it means to hire for fit — in our case, functional fit, purpose fit, diversity, and culture fit. Culture fit, in particular, plays a significant role at Leapsome. As of this year, we have a pool of people from across the organization trained to do these late-stage interviews that ensure a candidate’s values align with the Leapsome mission, vision, and values.

In terms of compensation, the team ran an extensive benchmarking exercise in the summer to ensure we continue to pay competitively. We believe that our clear level and salary framework is important for our internal DEI efforts, as it supports us to pay people fairly regardless of privilege. One outcome of the benchmarking exercise was increasing the competitiveness of our offers regarding salary, bonus, WFH support, benefits, and other things.

To continue meeting ambitious hiring targets, we introduced a referral program offering a very attractive bonus for employees that successfully refer talent for open positions. After all, who knows better than our people what we look for in new applicants!

Looking after our people with Oliva

Our purpose at Leapsome is to make work more fulfilling for everyone, everywhere. We believe that professional fulfillment can contribute significantly to personal satisfaction, but we recognize many external factors influence this. Mental health is a big one. Just like we want everyone to have a great experience with work, we also believe everyone deserves good mental health. 

In September, we partnered with Oliva to provide all Leapsome employees with access to tailored mental health support, such as 1:1, drop-in, or chat therapy, group workshops, and manager-focused sessions — accessible with one click via Slack. For us, this was not a box-check exercise or just another benefit: we believe it’s one of the best things we can do to support our people.

Growing and satisfying our global customer base

With a bigger team, we could support even more companies in enabling, engaging and retaining high-performing teams. In 2022, we more than doubled our revenue and the number of users impacted by our platform grew by more than 100%. 

As we grow our customer base and scale Leapsome globally, with a particular focus on the US, the experience of our existing customers remains a top priority. Listen and Learn is one of the five Leapsome values, and we continuously use customer feedback to evaluate how we’re doing. In 2022, we received over 700 new reviews — with over 640 of them being 5-star reviews — on B2B software review platform G2. This brings us to a total of more than 900 reviews and an average rating of 4.8 out of five. We were also recognized as category leader by G2. We are very proud of these accomplishments which underline our customer satisfaction and validate our mission.

We expanded our Berlin presence: Brunnenstraße 153

In 2021, we committed to a hybrid working policy that reflects our accommodating and inclusive culture. For hybrid to work, you need — at the very least — enough space for all team members to have the option to come into the office. As a result of our scaling in 2022, we quickly outgrew our existing Berlin office space and opened a much bigger office on Brunnenstraße in October. 

The new office offers a delightfully designed environment for work, collaboration, and social interactions to continue building Leapsome — and growing the team. It’s buzzing with energy these days! We’ve had plenty of engaging workshops, team events, and impromptu social gatherings here already — including, most recently, pre-holiday-party drinks and a Hanukkah celebration!

We launched our inaugural NYC presence: 135 Madison Ave.

The US is the leading software market in the world, and we’re already working with about 500 US-based customers that use Leapsome to make work more fulfilling for their people. When we reported on the Series A funding in March, we communicated our intention to expand to the US and open an office in NYC. In November, we officially delivered on this and announced the opening of Leapsome NYC with a starting headcount of 25. We also communicated Jenny’s plan to relocate to the Big Apple early next year to scale the US business.

Our successful co-CEO model provides the unique opportunity to commit to both markets at a leadership level. With a co-CEO on each side of the Atlantic, we underline our ambition to build an international company in a global category.

The need for an on-the-ground US presence speaks to the rapid evolution of the global HR technology market, which is projected to grow from US$24.04 billion in 2021 to US$35.66 billion in 2038. The Leapsome NYC office will allow us to provide local support for our expanding US customer base and continue to scale globally.

Underlining our commitment to hybrid

We believe that creating a productive and enriching environment for everyone at Leapsome is essential to great and fulfilling work. We remain committed to a hybrid approach because it reflects our culture and unites desires for individual autonomy and connection. 

In 2022, we hired many people from all over Germany. These colleagues work in a hybrid setup, but as they are not based in Berlin, they don’t have access to our office on a day-to-day basis. To compensate for that and ensure they feel connected while working, we signed a contract with OneCoworking. Now, all hybrid employees living in Germany can book themselves into a co-working space in their place of residence up to three times per week through OneCoworking.

Product highlights

Our product team does an excellent job keeping pace with our growth ambitions, and 2022 was no different. With regular platform updates throughout the year and the launch of the Compensation module for promotion and compensation management, we continued to make Leapsome more accessible, inclusive, engaging, and customizable to service our customers’ unique needs. These are a few of our 2022 product highlights:

‍Reward: In September, we added a new module to the Leapsome platform. The Compensation module enables HR and People teams to create scalable processes and workflows, empowers managers to make better decisions, and equips leaders to ensure transparent and equitable employee treatment across the organization. As such, Compensation enables a fair and consistent compensation and promotion experience for everyone. Compensation now sits alongside Engage, Learn, Reviews and Align.

On the Surveys side, we added several important features to surveys:
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• Granular benchmarks: In addition to the generic survey benchmarks, you can now access granular benchmarks that automatically adjust to your company’s size, country, and industry — so you can benchmark with similar companies. ‍
• Turnover prediction and analysis: Our new turnover prediction and analysis feature allows you to take informed action to increase employee retention. It provides a retrospective analysis of your current turnover rate and an estimate for future employee turnover.

We continued to build out the Learning module by adding new content and analytics:

• GoodHabitz: We partnered with GoodHabitz to bring exciting learning content to our platform and now host five free GoodHabitz courses for all users of the Learn module. 
• LinkedIn Learning: You can now embed LinkedIn Learning courses into our learning paths and seamlessly add any SCORM, xAPI, AICC, and CMI5 content as ‘learning elements.’ 
• Analytics: Learning analytics enable admins and managers to get a deeper understanding of how employees are progressing across all learning paths.‍
• Open-ended questions: You can now ask open-ended questions in learning paths. Learning admins can choose whether approval is required and select approvers — including the direct manager of the employee. It will unlock diverse use cases such as asking participants to respond by uploading a file, or video, submitting an open-text response, or a combination of all.

We continued to broaden the scope of the Perform module:

• External peer reviews: It is now possible for admins to enable nominations of external peer reviewers in their review cycles. Learn more about this in our success center article.
• We’ve now made it possible to conduct review calibrations directly within the (9, 16, or 25) box grid. You can just drag and drop employees within the grids during the calibration meeting. We’ve also added the calibration context for each employee with past feedback, history of calibration, and all calibration notes.

Instant feedback: The anonymous suggestion box enables employees to provide fully anonymous feedback at any time to the Leapsome super-admins.

Platform: We’ve fully revamped the user and team dashboards to make it easy to find all relevant information. Based on extensive user feedback and research, we’ve simplified finding all open tasks that need to be done and made it easy to find past reviews, progress on goals, etc.

With a new year ahead of us, we intend to build on these successes, draw insights from our shared learnings and continue to work together to achieve our 2023 objectives. Just as important — we want to continue having fun, supporting one and other, and making the 80,000 hours we spend at work in our lives more fulfilling. 

Particularly in a challenging macroeconomic environment, business leaders want to build high-performing teams and resilient organizations. We are ready to help them do this by driving employee development, productivity, and engagement — even through times of change — with Leapsome’s intelligent people enablement platform. 

If this sounds interesting to you, then we’d love to hear from you. We’re hiring across several teams and functions in both Berlin and NYC.