Sure the latest initiatives from the Teslas, Apples and Googles of the industry tend to dominate the tech news space — and with good reason. Still, the tech titans aren’t the only ones bringing innovation to the sector.
In an effort to highlight up-and-coming startups, Built In has launched The Future 5 across 11 major U.S. tech hubs. Each quarter, we will feature five tech startups, nonprofits or entrepreneurs in each of these hubs who just might be working on the next big thing. You can check out last quarter’s Seattle round-up here.
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Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are major talking points among startups and tech companies, and studies demonstrate that having a diverse workforce can lead to better work outcomes and innovations. Talks about diversifying workforces, however, tend to only revolve around recruiting and little attention is paid to retaining talent. As a result women, Black and Latino talent in the tech industry often have higher turnover rates.
Redmond-based Included was founded to help companies remedy the issues with DEI recruiting and retention and has developed a software that makes the process simpler for clients to track and analyze their internal data.
“I was shocked that no big data solutions supported the full spectrum of needs for DEI initiatives. No other parts of a business, like finance, sales, etc., can function without the needed data and platforms,” Included CEO and co-founder Raghu Gollamudi told Built In over email. “My fellow co-founders Chandan Golla, Laura Close and I came together with a vision to simplify the world’s transition to a diverse workforce with an all-in-one DEI platform. We help companies build winning teams with DEI data science.”
Included’s platform is filled with useful tools such as ways to analyze employees’ race and ethnicity on a departmental level. It also features an employee lifecycle visualization tool to find out at what stage employees are leaving a company and analytic tools that can track hiring data and give actionable steps a business can take to be more inclusive.
Included helps leaders have confidence in their talent attraction strategy and allows HR professionals to focus on what they love — delighting candidates and employees with an inclusive, equitable journey.”
While the software is used by HR teams, Included specifically labels its tech as not being an HR software but instead DEI software. The distinction is that the platform connects with other HR software and analyzes hiring data to give actionable steps for DEI initiatives.
“Included automates and monitors your progress with real-time reporting. Finally, Included’s DEI Helper adds efficiency by delivering data-driven action steps to your team that increases the likelihood of success in diversity sourcing and hiring,” Gollamudi said. “Included helps leaders have confidence in their talent attraction strategy and allows HR professionals to focus on what they love — delighting candidates and employees with an inclusive, equitable journey.”
Since launching, the company has seen incredible growth and demand for its products. Recently, Included announced that it witnessed a 400 percent increase in annual revenue in the span of a year. The Seattle-based company also secured $3.5 million in venture funding in May.
Included is now looking to scale its engineering teams in order to keep up with the demand for its platform.
