How Techstars Leverages Illoominus to Enhance its Data Driven People Insights and Storytelling 

Techstars is a leading pre-seed venture capital firm, investing in a diverse global pool of entrepreneurs and high-growth companies, with ~4,000 companies in its portfolio. Since 2006, Techstars has been on a mission to help entrepreneurs succeed. They do this by operating accelerator programs and venture capital funds and by helping build thriving startup communities around the world. Techstars has a global workforce of over 200 employees across 20 countries supporting their operations.

Goals

When Aparna joined Techstars in 2022 as Chief Human Capital Officer, she believed that a data-driven human capital function was a significant value add for the organization and its leadership, particularly having robust KPIs and metrics that answered key strategic “how do you know” questions and provided a window into the state of the company’s management, people, and culture. 

She understood the importance and power of using data to support business decisions, and she had a clear point of view on the data reporting and analytics Techstars needed to report on a comprehensive set of human capital KPIs and metrics. However, producing, analyzing, and synthesizing the data manually from multiple human capital data sources and systems was inefficient and highly labor-intensive, taking up a significant amount of the team’s time each month. 

Aparna strategically sought a partner to help Techstars automate, integrate, and streamline its human capital reporting, accelerating Techstars' ability to tell a richer, more cohesive story.

“I was looking for a solution that would connect and integrate human capital data sets across the entire employee journey and talent lifecycle, as well as visualize and synthesize the data to provide key insights and help tell the story.” - Aparna Ramaswamy, Chief Human Capital Officer

Solution

Techstars evaluated several solutions in the market and found Illoominus to be the most mature and robust for the investment, while also being more cost-effective for a middle-market company. 

Illoominus provided Techstars with a turnkey people analytics solution that integrated and standardized all people data across its entire HR tech stack. This has enabled Techstars to automate the monthly human capital KPI and metrics reporting and given its leadership team the visibility and ability to better understand the employee journey — from talent acquisition, onboarding, and performance management to promotions, engagement, and retention — and, as a result, address the organization’s most pressing challenges. 

“I am very bullish on what Illoominus is building. We decided to partner with Illoominus because we saw it as an investment in what it solves for now and what we know the platform can become in the next 3-5 years.” - Aparna Ramaswamy, Chief Human Capital Officer

Outcomes

Techstars implemented Illoominus in under three weeks and stood up the first complete metrics reporting cycle, replacing the former highly manual labor intensive process, in six weeks. 

Illoominus has not only helped Techstars automate the monthly human capital metrics summary report, but also enabled it to tell a richer, more cohesive story through improved data visualization, trends over time, and connecting the dots in the employee journey.

Early results include the following:

• Eliminated many hours of manual work and reduced the involvement of team members’ time from four to two each month to prepare the executive summary report

• Shifted the focus to providing deeper insights with an ability to double click into the data to quickly understand and diagnose problem areas and drive improvement actions

• Reduced the need for a full-time FTE focused on people data reporting and analytics

“As we look ahead, we are excited about the possibilities with Illoominus. In particular, providing more advanced and eventually predictive analytics and insights, which will be a game changer.” - Aparna Ramaswamy, Chief Human Capital Officer