Philadelphia-area HR tech firm makes 5th acquisition

The Ambler-based Phenom continues its acquisition spree with its fifth purchase in four years.

Phenom, an AI-powered HR tech company, sought out Tydy because of its onboarding and offboarding technology. Phenom had been considering possible companies to work with for the past six months but ultimately went with Tydy because of its team. Both the company’s culture and its actual product seemed to fit well with Phenom, Mahe Bayireddi, CEO and co-founder of Phenom, told Technical.ly.

“(We’ve been) working on this for the past three years as a product,” Bayireddi said. “We’re looking at the market and Tydy came along and it was a perfect product for what our point of view is and what we’re really building.”

Bayireddi declined to share the financial details of the deal. There were no layoffs with the acquisition and Tydy’s team of 40 will be joining Phenom’s 1,500-person staff. Phenom hopes Tydy will help it create an onboarding experience combining backend automation with the overall HR experience, according to Bayireddi.

Tydy’s employee data platform will now be available to customers through Phenom. It supports preboarding, onboarding, compliance checks, background checks, documentation processes, payroll and offboarding.

“The two co-founders were really connected,” Bayireddi said. “They have a purpose and they really did a good job at really building this product. And they understood the customer know-how in a much more effective format, there is a customer passion towards it.”

A history of acquisitions to fill the gaps

Phenom acquired four other companies prior to this deal with Tydy. Most recently, it bought employee experience platform Tandemploy in 2022 to improve its talent experience management platform and grow its presence in Europe.

Over six months in 2020 and 2021, Phenom bought three companies: AI scheduling platform My Ally, recruitment tool Endouble and video tech company Talentcube. Around the same time, Phenom raised a $100 million Series D fundraising round.

With the latest purchase, Phenom is thinking about growth. The company is looking into how it can better understand the talent space with more context and fill any gaps, Bayireddi said. As long as there are companies that fit into that strategy and fit with Phenom, the company will keep going after those acquisition opportunities.

“We’re looking at which particular companies can help us in understanding that,” Bayireddi said. “So that we can use automation and gen AI in an effective format so that we can make a difference for these people.”

Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.

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