Sweden’s Creandum Invest $3.75m in Danish Planday


    Danish startup Playday are behind a successful SaaS workforce management program which is the leading software of its type in the Nordics. Now as they look to expand their operations worldwide and capture a huge, unexploited market they’ve partnered with venture capital firm Creandum to get the investment and expertise they need to realise their vision for growth.

    Creandum specialise in investing in early-stage technology companies, with previous investments going to the likes of Spotify, Izettle, Videplaza, Vivino and Autobutler. They have pointed out that they have experience in building global companies coming from the Nordics and specifically from previous SaaS investments where they talk about how they have a lot of experience in how to best sell software and tools to the restaurant and hospitality industry. The firm has 250 million Euros under management and prides itself at being the fastest growing independent partnership of its kind in the Nordic region.

    Christian Brøndum, CEO of Planday, said, “We have grown organically since day one, and we have been profitable from the beginning. However, we needed capital to speed up our geographical expansion, as we want to capture this $5Bn market opportunity. Mid 2013, we went on the hunt for venture capital, and on our search, we found an investor, who will not just provide the necessary funding for our growth, but is also extremely competent in cracking some of the challenges we face ahead.”

    Planday’s workforce management software allows companies to throw out those whiteboards and delete all the confusing spreadsheets they’ve used until now to manage employee scheduling. The real beauty of the software is that it can also be used to manage shift trading, communication, HR and payroll as well. Oh and all this can be done online, or through mobile platforms by anyone in the company as well.

    As Christian said, they have been profitable from the beginning and Planday has experienced more than 100% YoY growth over the past few years. Companies all over the world are having to face the challenges of managing their workforce and as technology takes its place at every level it makes sense that this work would be moved off whiteboards and onto computers.

    ”There are a lot of small and medium-sized companies in the international markets to whom we can pitch our product. In the next few years, many of these companies will discard their pen and paper solutions and choose a modern cloud based mobile software solution instead. We want to be the solution they choose. Our customers get paid back immediately after using our system and basically never leave our platform, so we have great experience in keeping our customers happy once they have started using Planday. With the money from Creandum, we are able to take the necessary steps much faster than we otherwise would have, and we therefore have a real chance of becoming the number one scheduling system in the world,” said Christian Brøndum.

    Playday have tried to implement every relevant function and rule related to workforce scheduling they could think of over the last few years. Then along with that they have created HR, payroll, reporting and document management solutions, launched APIs and integrated their solution into most large POS systems to allow their customers to manage almost all relevant aspects of their business through Planday. The plan now is that as they ramp up sales and product development efforts, they will work on making the product more autonomous and easy to connect with different modules.

    “We strongly believe that the Planday team has what it takes to make the company an international success. They already have a good, solid customer base with many loyal customers. And they have already proved that they can grow and make money at the same time. There is a huge market for software solutions making businesses’ workdays a bit easier, and we already have a lot of experience in SaaS companies in general and selling to the hospitality industry in particular, which is why Planday seemed like a perfect company for us to invest in,” said Johan Brenner, partner in Creandum.