For decades, compensation and workforce planning have been stuck in spreadsheet purgatory—fragmented, reactive, and riddled with risk. But CandorIQ, a Y Combinator-backed startup, just raised a $4.8 million seed round to change that. Led by Array Ventures and joined by CRV, Switch Ventures, and Y Combinator, the funding will supercharge CandorIQ’s product roadmap, grow its team, and double down on embedding AI into compensation and headcount decisions.

The Problem: Spreadsheets Can’t Scale Strategy

“People spend” accounts for 70% of operating costs, yet companies manage it with the same rigor as a high school group project—toggling between disconnected tools, Slack threads, and stale Excel files. It’s a broken system that leaves HR and Finance teams firefighting rather than forecasting.

CandorIQ’s premise is simple but timely: replace the chaos with an AI-powered, centralized platform that aligns HR, Finance, and leadership with real-time data and automated workflows. No more spreadsheet stitching. No more flying blind during merit cycles or headcount shifts.

“Workforce planning shouldn’t feel like a quarterly fire drill,” said Haris Ikram, CEO and Co-Founder of CandorIQ. “We built CandorIQ to make comp and headcount decisions smarter, faster, and actually collaborative.”

The Fix: Embedded AI for Real-Time People Strategy

At its core, CandorIQ is positioning itself as the system of record for workforce planning. Its AI doesn’t just analyze—it flags outliers, models headcount scenarios, and proactively guides decisions before problems surface. Whether it’s identifying top performers at risk of churn or preventing equity misalignment, the platform turns what used to take hours into seconds.

Key capabilities include:

• Automated compensation review cycles
• Scenario planning across hiring/firing/freezing decisions
• AI-driven churn and equity risk alerts
• Integrations with 100+ HR and Finance tools
• Centralized benchmarking, budgeting, and offer modeling

Customers like Newfront, SmartRecruiters, Monte Carlo, and Fleetio are already using CandorIQ to cut hiring timelines by half, reduce churn by 25%, and save upwards of $500,000 annually.

The Market: Riding the HR-Tech Reset

CandorIQ’s timing couldn’t be better. In the post-VC boom era, companies are laser-focused on cost control, lean operations, and smarter growth. Workforce planning is now mission-critical—not a once-a-year HR ritual.

And while players like Workday, Carta, and Anaplan offer components of the solution, they’re often bloated, siloed, or lack true AI-driven decision support. CandorIQ’s advantage lies in its end-to-end approach: not just analytics, but automation, collaboration, and real-time insight at every decision point.

Shruti Gandhi, partner at Array Ventures, puts it bluntly: “Compensation is both one of the biggest cost centers inside a company and one of the least well-managed. CandorIQ is bringing clarity, automation, and accountability to a space that’s been held together by spreadsheets for too long.”

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