We’re excited to announce that Volition Capital has led a $25 million Series A investment in Kombo, the infrastructure platform solving one of the most critical challenges in the global workforce ecosystem: interoperability.
As companies adopt an ever-growing stack of HR, payroll, recruiting, IT, and workforce management systems, people data has become increasingly fragmented — siloed across platforms, costly to move, and difficult to standardize. At the same time, the digitization of work has created a workforce technology market exceeding $40 billion today and projected to surpass $100 billion by 2030.
Kombo sits at the center of this complexity. By building the infrastructure layer that enables secure, reliable data flow across systems of record and point solutions — from hire to retire — Kombo is making the workforce ecosystem function as one.
We’re thrilled to partner with CEO and co-founder Alex Kuebel and the entire Kombo team as they scale globally, expand their integration capabilities, and continue building enterprise-grade infrastructure for the AI-powered future of work. Volition Partner Sean Cantwell will join the board as part of the investment.
Below, Alex shares more about Kombo’s vision and what this Series A enables:
Interoperability Is the Defining Problem of the Workforce Ecosystem
Across history, humans have always organized labor to create value. While the forms of work have evolved, the need to coordinate people and their outcomes has remained constant. Over the past 50+ years, the digitization of work triggered a Cambrian explosion of technologies:
- systems of record (HRIS, Payroll, ATS, LMS)
- specialized point solutions
- and broader platforms.
- This created enormous value, turning the workforce ecosystem into a $40B+market today, on track to exceed $100B by 2030. At the same time, it introduced massive complexity: people data became siloed, brittle, and expensive to move. This is the core of the problem we’re solving.
Kombo Provides the Infrastructure Layer for People Data
We are entering another major transition. The AI-powered future of work will look very different in ten years, but one thing remains true: regardless of how work changes, people data must reliably move between systems, tools, machines, and humans.
- Work will continue to evolve, while the need for systems of record and people data will not
- Change increases fragmentation: every new wave of innovation introduces more systems, more vendors, and more data silos
Kombo exists to break these silos and provide the infrastructure layer that enables this ecosystem to function.
🔑 We sit at the center of the interoperability problem, providing the infrastructure layer for the flow of all people data — from hire to retire.
From Today’s Scale to a Long-Term Vision
We raised to move faster at a global scale. Today, Kombo works with 300+companies, including Indeed, Paychex, Thatch, HireVue, Mercor, Juicebox, Edenred, Gem etc.
Over the next few years, we will:
- expand capabilities for agentic and API integrations across HR, Payroll and IT systems
- continue investing in enterprise-grade flexibility (including on-prem and advanced security requirements)
- …
We will also scale our team across two continents, with a strong emphasis ontechnical excellence, reliability, and long-term ownership.
Our vision:
- the entire people data , from hire to retire, runs globally on Kombo’s infrastructure
- Kombo becomes the backbone of not just HR tech, but of any company that depends on workforce data across systems of record and point solutions
People data is among the most sensitive data companies handle. Fragmentation creates risk – reliability compounds. We believe this demands a single, trusted infrastructure layer. Kombo is built for this reality: combining European rigor and compliance-by-design with US ambition and scale.
Work and the technology around it will keep changing. New tools will emerge, and old ones will be replaced. But the need for connectivity will only grow. This Series A is a step toward building that infrastructure, and a workforce ecosystem that works as one.
I’m excited about a future where the companies shaping the workforce ecosystem can focus on building great products, while we take care of the underlying infrastructure.
Read here for more on why more on why Volition invested in Kombo.
