HR tech entrepreneur Bruce Marable just launched his new data-focused venture

After stepping back from his last human resources tech venture a few years ago, Bruce Marable said he knew there was still space in Philly’s market for another HR service.

Marable had started gatherDocs, a mobile hiring software, with cofounder Alex King and developer TJ Robleto. After working with Colorado-based Efficient Hire closely for a year, the companies merged in 2015, and in 2016, Marbale stepped back.

A new venture would have to be laser-focused, Marable told Technical.ly. gatherDocs had been competing in a crowded market, “so we needed to find a small niche,” he said.

Three years later, Marable and cofounder Salas Saraiya have teamed up on new venture, Employee Cycle, and have announced the beta launch of its HR analytics dashboard. The product comes at a time where HR is looking more and more to data to handle “people operations,” Marable said.

The dashboard works with small- and medium-sized companies under 1,000 employees to transform disparate data into a centralized and real-time HR analytics dashboard. The software handles data for turnover, tenure, diversity, employee engagement and other areas so HR professionals can spend more time implementing programs and working with employees.

“By leveraging the accessibility of APIs from a wide variety of HR systems, HR leaders gain a single data-driven view of their entire workforce,” the company explained in a release.

Marable said there were a few key factors driving the creation of this software, including that the field of human resources has become increasingly strategic and data driven, and that the programs used to manage employee information can be incredibly siloed.

“With companies now needing to leverage HR data to make better workforce decisions, it’s time for HR to have their first ‘system of intelligence,’ being one centralized place to view, track, share and analyze all their people data,” Marable said in the company’s announcement. “We’re allowing HR leaders to connect their HRIS to our dashboard for free, removing all hurdles to start building a more data-driven HR culture.”

Marable worked on the software with Saraiya, who is the company’s CTO, and about nine contractors.

They’re currently fundraising for a pre-seed round after raising $475,000 in initial funds from local investors including Ben Franklin Technology Partners, AJ Bruno from Quotapath, Steven Finn of Local Stove, Bob Moore of Crossbeam and The Enterprise Center. Their current fundraising will go toward getting customers integrated into the system and sharing the dashboard internally and externally.

“We wanted to make it as easy and user-friendly as possible because the real goal is for the data to inform you to be able to go do the hard people work,” Marable said.