Starting up with Oscar Mattsson

On Tuesdays, we get into the weeds with the founders of HR tech startups. Want to tell us about your company? Get in touch here.

Oscar Mattsson is the founder and CEO of allwhere, a company that couples an employee life-cycle management platform with the hardware-procurement services remote teams need to do business. Since its founding in 2021, the company has raised $9.5 million in seed funding from venture capital studio DESCOvery. HR Brew spoke to Mattsson about allwhere’s logistical services—including how it helps companies retrieve devices when employees leave, in order to lessen the financial burden of lost equipment—and the future of HR tech.

What product or service does your company offer? Let’s say we were to launch at Morning Brew. Your head of IT and HR would have what we call an Amazon-like internal platform. It would be filled with the curated selection of products that your company or employee base might need to do their job…When it ships from us, it’s preloaded with your [company’s] software…It’s all the things related to work, but all in one place…We handle the procurement, the management, the storage or retrieval of these assets that I described, and we deliver them anywhere.

How does the service work? When it’s time for an onboarding, [HR and IT] just click a button, or you can trigger it from your HRS, and that’s when it comes to allwhere, and then we fulfill the kit. We coordinate with the employee and make sure that that’s an amazing first experience…it enables HR and IT to outsource and automate the logistics that are associated with getting people set up.

What specific issue in HR does your company attempt to solve? Businesses are struggling to service their distributed workforce…[HR understands that] supporting employees in one office is not easy. The second you start adding multiple geographies, or multiple vendors, or multiple departments, the complexity just absolutely multiplies and gets out of control really fast…It’s been just plopped on HR and IT and they’ve been saddled with this problem. What we’re really talking about here is that everything an employee needs is now a logistics problem.

How does your company solve that specific issue? When we work with our clients…we take something that’s kind of a quagmire right now and we turn it into an amazing employee experience…We all aspirationally think that working in hybrid environments, or just having a distributed company, is great for a ton of really valid business reasons. But we would all agree that logistically, it’s a bit of a nightmare. And so, where we sit is very practically making it easier for companies to engage with this method.

How do you think the HR tech field will evolve over the next five to 10 years? I personally believe that the future of work is about flexibility. It’s not about one work model. What we saw is that HR and IT really led from the front in helping companies navigate the challenges that came with the scramble of work with the advent of Covid-19…As we continue to look at these newer models, they’re going to be seen as sources of innovation for companies to create. As a result, you’re going to see increased investment and increased startup activity to support these leaders.

How will your company help drive that innovation? There’s a lot of people thinking practically about: So, you want to go remote? How do you do that? So, you want to move your engineers to a different city? Okay, how are you going to make sure that they have as good of office support and experience as your core employees? That’s where I sit, being very pragmatic about solving this really difficult logistical problem that manifests in a number of different ways of getting physical business critical items to employees on time easily, in a way that enables HR and IT and doesn’t continue saddling them with the challenge.

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