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As a former McKinsey management consultant, Jennifer Smith recalls the pain of trying to capture and document employee workflows. “I would literally look over people’s shoulders with stop watches and write down what I saw them do,” she said.
But that granular understanding of how employees spend their time and get their work done is needed for onboarding and offboarding workers, or explaining complex internal processes. “Most of that work’s invisible,” she explained. “It lives in people’s heads and is institutional know-how that walks out the door every day at 5 p.m. and you have to hope that it comes back.”
So in 2019, Smith cofounded Scribe, a workflow AI platform to help companies document how work gets done and automatically generate step-by-step guides for employees. This week, the company announced a new $75 million Series C funding round, bringing total funding to $130 million at a $1.3 billion valuation, Smith said. Investors include StepStone, Amplify Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Tiger Global, among others.
Smith, Scribe’s CEO, said the new funding round will go toward launching Scribe Optimize, an agent that analyzes workflows and offers tailored suggestions on how to improve them.
Currently, Scribe boasts 75,000 customers, including LinkedIn, T-Mobile, and New York Life. Smith says 45% of Fortune 500 companies are paying customers, though a free version is also available.
And in a space currently led by consultancies, Smith says she’s banking on time savings to set her product apart. The technology doesn’t come cheap, with a price tag in the “five to seven figures” per year, depending on usage, product configuration, and level of customization, with team plans starting at $12 per user per month, the company said. But Smith cites customer surveys indicating that employees can save between 35 and 41 hours per month using the system.
“I think the way that we spend most of our nine-to-five knowledge work is a deep waste of time,” Smith said. “Human talent is one of the most powerful forces in the universe, and we’re just grossly misallocating it in the way that we structure work.”
Kristin Stoller
Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media
kristin.stoller@fortune.com
Around the Table
A round-up of the most important HR headlines.
Where did performance reviews come from? They’ve been around for more than a century, but many companies are starting to reconsider how they do them. Wall Street Journal
Once associated with politics, the chief of staff position is becoming more popular in the business world. Financial Times
More students are now double-majoring, seeking a competitive edge in a bleak job market. Washington Post
Watercooler
Everything you need to know from Fortune.
Tokyo test. As Japan faces an aging population, the Tokyo Metropolitan government is allowing its employees to work only four days a week. —Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez
Breakup break. A Millennial CEO shared the “most honest” absence request he had received: A Gen Z employee asked to take days off to deal with a heartbreak. —Jessica Coachi
IBM layoffs. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna had promised increased hiring of college graduates, but the company announced major layoffs last week. —Preston Fore