Startup profile: Employee Cycle

  • Founded by: Bruce Marable and Salas Saraiya
  • Year founded: 2018
  • Headquarters: Philadelphia, PA
  • Sector: HR tech
  • Funding and valuation: ~$3 million raised
  • Key ecosystem partners: Comcast

We’ve all heard it: Employees are a company’s greatest asset. 

But for many HR teams, actually understanding their workforce means exporting spreadsheets from multiple systems, stitching them together by hand and hoping the numbers line up.

“[HR leaders want] a single pane of glass — a one‑stop shop to see all the data and tell a data‑driven story about the workforce.”

Bruce Marable, Employee Cycle

“It’s that same problem that every department has tried to solve,” Bruce Marable, CEO and cofounder of Philadelphia-based Employee Cycle told Technical.ly. HR leaders, he said, want “a single pane of glass — a one‑stop shop to see all the data and tell a data‑driven story about the workforce.”

Marable and cofounder Salas Saraiya, who serves as CTO, built Employee Cycle to give human resources professionals that unified view.

Their platform pulls workforce data from disconnected systems into one place and aims to help teams make sense of what’s happening across the employee “lifecycle.”

Building around a problem HR teams already knew well

Before Employee Cycle became a product, Marable and Saraiya kept hearing the same thing: even with more software in place, teams were still manually trying to answer basic workforce questions.

To test whether they could solve that problem, the founders took a methodical approach. They met with HR leaders to confirm the pain was real. Saraiya built a prototype (initially filled with dummy data) to learn how teams wanted to see metrics visualized. Then they asked companies to share real data, and later API access, to see whether the product could work with real systems.

Salas Saraiya standing on the right in front of foliage
Employee Cycle cofounders Bruce Marable (left) and Salas Saraiya in 2022 (Courtesy)

“If anyone in an organization who’s already super busy is willing to do something manually and painfully, then clearly there must be a need,” Marable said.

On the go-to-market side, they followed they were just as methodical cold emails, demos, free trials and conversions from companies they had never met. Early traction, Marable said, helped Employee Cycle raise initial funding, build the product and hire a team. The company later joined Comcast NBCUniversal’s 2021 LIFT Labs accelerator, another milestone that helped fuel growth.

“We had validated enough on the technical side to say there’s a ‘there’ there from a problem-solution standpoint,” Marable said.

From dashboards to decisions

Today, Employee Cycle works with more than 100 companies and processes millions of employee records, according to Marable. The team is about 10 people, most working remotely, with Marable based out of a Philadelphia coworking space.

Marable said the company’s thinking has long been shaped by a simple comparison: 

The customer lifecycle and the employee lifecycle are not all that different. In both cases, organizations want to understand where people come from, how they move through a system and why they stay or leave.

Early on, Employee Cycle focused on aggregating data and turning it into dashboards. “It really was more about, how do we aggregate the data in one place so that we can give fast, clean insights and KPIs across different areas of the business?” Marable said.

Now the company is shifting toward helping HR leaders make decisions, not just reports. That means surfacing insights automatically and pointing leaders toward actions they can take based on what the data shows.

What’s next: A shared source of truth

Marable sees a broader opportunity ahead: helping HR, finance and operations work from the same information.

“A lot of HR and finance leaders are working from different sets of data, but on the same problem set,” he said. Marable said workforce planning, headcount reporting and payroll forecasting often rely on mismatched numbers. Employee Cycle wants to sit at the center of that Venn diagram, giving each department a shared source of truth.

The goal, Marable said, is to help HR leaders become some of the most data‑savvy people in their organizations.

“Employee Cycle is the data‑driven view of the employee lifecycle,” Marable said. “We want everyone in the organization speaking the same language.”

This story is made possible thanks to support from Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania, a nonprofit that leads the Philadelphia region’s equitable economic growth by nurturing and investing in innovative, early-stage companies, and through purposeful involvement in regional and national initiatives. All stories are independently reported, with no partner review.