It’s a big day for us at Complete! We’ve raised $4M in seed funding led by Accel, with support from Y Combinator. Angel investors include executives from Calm, Opendoor and Stripe. This news comes on the heels of our completion of Y Combinator earlier this year.
We thought it’d be a great opportunity for us to share more about what we’re building at Complete, technology that turns employee compensation into a strategic advantage.
Many companies see their compensation plans as an afterthought. We want to help businesses get compensation right from the beginning, because it plays a crucial role in how both candidates and employees develop trust with their employer. Meanwhile, historically, there’s been very little accountability around compensation – people don’t know what questions to ask or who’s the right person to discuss it with.
That’s where we come in. At Complete, we believe leading with transparency across the organization is core to a company’s DNA. We want founders, executives, candidates, and employees to understand why and how compensation decisions are made, starting with their compensation philosophy.
Our technology starts by allowing companies to create compensation philosophies that align with their business goals and are then implemented company-wide, so that there’s no guesswork involved and teams can be assured they’re offering fair and equitable compensation plans. We integrate across the people lifecycle - starting with the candidates through their Applicant Tracking System down to the employee records through their HRIS.
From there, we’ve created an unmatched offer experience that is interactive, engaging, and educational. We help candidates fully comprehend the company’s compensation philosophy before getting a deep view of every aspect of their offer, including cash, equity, bonuses, and benefits. Features include calculators and sliders, so that candidates also understand their long term earning potential. This interactivity and visibility is what we have recently extended to employees as well, so they have a source of truth to their evolving compensation plans.
When people are able to comprehend the full value of an offer, even when it comes to equity and benefits that are complex or difficult to grasp, we’ve found applicants are 30% more likely to accept their offer when companies are transparent and forthcoming about how they approach company building and compensation. This is massive in the talent market that has seen record high vacant roles and high turnover from employees.
Today we work with dozens of companies, including growth-stage companies like Convex and TrueNorth, as well as established companies like Vercel and DataStax. We’ve evaluated over 5,000 salaries and employee records to help our customers retain their top talent, as well as hold their teams accountable to their own best practices.
This capital will allow us to make key strategic hires across product and design, so we can expand our onboarding platform to be even more powerful.
“Competition for exceptional talent is fierce, and in today’s changing market, candidates and employees struggle to make sense of what their total equity package might be worth now and in the future,” said Amy Saper, Partner, Accel. “Complete enables companies to use compensation as a critical tool to help close and retain top talent. Their platform is uniquely focused on helping startups set the right compensation foundation from the beginning, while providing a suite of tools that enable talent, finance, and people teams to collaborate around the candidate and employee experience as their organizations scale.”
We’re in the midst of a rebalancing - between the Great Renegotiation, a changing economic landscape and post-covid re-evaluation. People are deeply evaluating roles for the right fit considering location, company size, stage and more. COVID and inflation may have been symptoms, but they are not the cause; the American work culture has been in need of major changes for decades. Complete is here to help build out a new structure, bringing a culture of transparency around compensation practices and philosophy, both internally and externally.
Throughout our careers at companies like Google, Uber, Lyft and Opendoor, we saw just how tough hiring can be – even for a big well known brand – and how confusion over compensation was often at the core of it. The hours we spent chatting through offers and promotions with team members are what we're channeling in an end-to-end product experience for high growth companies so winning isn't guesswork (or luck) anymore. We’re excited to help a new generation of companies and employees match with one another by creating deeper connection and understanding. If you’d like to get in touch or are interested in learning more about how our product can work for your business, request a demo.