TruePlan brings data to companies’ headcount and hiring plans

TruePlan, a so-called “headcount management” platform that helps companies plan and forecast all the budgeting and resource requirements across its entire workforce, officially launched to the public today. The company also announced a $17 million series A round of funding led by General Catalyst.

The term “headcount,” for TruePlan’s purpose at least, refers to a company’s current employees, approved hires, and any roles that it’s currently hiring for. Users connect TruePlan to their human resources information system (HRIS) of choice (e.g. BambooHR, Gusto, or Zenefits) to generate real-time feeds of all their current teams and associated costs, and then integrate with applicant tracking systems (ATS) (e.g. Workable, Greenhouse, or Lever) to leverage data around a company’s hiring endeavors.

“TruePlan plays a distinct role in joining this information to create an accurate headcount forecast ranging from active employees all the way to ideas for future teams,” TruePlan cofounder and CEO Dan Green told VentureBeat.

Thus, TruePlan becomes what it calls a “single source of truth” for a company’s entire current and (potential) future workforce, bypassing the need to manually reconcile countless spreadsheets, documents, and email or Slack threads to understand their current and future headcount outlook. This kind of data can be useful for figuring out budgets and which roles or departments are prioritized over others.

“As a leader or executive, headcount will be 70% of your operational spend on average — in a world that shifts as quickly as the last couple of years, your visibility and control over this process can determine the success or failure of your company,” Green explained.

Hire ground

Founded in 2020, TruePlan launched its beta beta product back in March ahead of today’s official launch, and although Green wasn’t at liberty to divulge any specific client names, he did note that the ultimate target customers are high-growth businesses with more than 200 employees.

“TruePlan is currently working in industries ranging from manufacturing to SaaS with some of the fastest growing companies in the world,” Green added.

It’s worth noting that TruePlan serves different purposes for different departments. Finance teams, for example, might use TruePlan to track headcount expenses and adjust their broader finance forecast for the year, while recruitment can use TruePlan to glean insights around the current approved hires to figure out capacity to fulfill requests for new hires.

“Finance, HR, recruitment, and department leaders all need the same, accurate headcount information to perform their very different roles,” Green said. “Today’s fragmented spreadsheet world leads to different data sets across all these areas that often conflict with each other, leading to a constant stream of alignment meetings. Many of the executives we work with ranked headcount management as the area of the business they felt they had the least visibility into, and control over, because of these reasons. TruePlan’s platform solves these problems once and for all.”

Alongside lead investor General Catalyst, TruePlan’s series A round saw participation from Defy Partners and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, as well as a slew of angel investors including Flexport cofounder and CEO Ryan Petersen.