Chile’s Buk, which has developed a human resources management platform for Latin American companies, announced that it has raised $50 million in a Series A funding round that values the company at $417 million. Brazil and increasingly, as of late, Mexico, have received the bulk of funding from venture investors. But increasingly, other regions in Latin America such as Chile are also attracting global investor interest. Also of note is that Buk was bootstrapped for the first five years of its SaaS operations. Its first institutional investors include San Francisco-based Greenoaks, which led the Series A round, and SoftBank. Interestingly, a group of founders from unicorns such as Rappi, Kavak, Konfio, GBM, Ualá and Brex also put money in the round.
Founded in 2017 by Chileans Jaime Arrieta, Santiago Lira, Teresita Morán, Felipe Sateler and Ricardo Sateler, Buk is building a cloud-based platform that it says allows companies to manage their human resources “end to end” — from the payment of salaries to professional development. Buk also includes tools like company climate surveys, performance evaluations, recruitment modules and attendance monitoring with the mission to “build a happier workplace”. Buk has more than 4,000 clients that hail from a variety of industries in Latin America, including educational institutions, investment banks, fast food chains, law firms and others. It powers payroll for over 400,000 employees of Buk customers every month. Buk’s infrastructure is hosted on AWS servers, which means it can access multiple tools across its technological ecosystem. The company says it performs daily backups of its customers’ information, allowing it to keep the service running even in the event of third-party data failures. Buk says it also offers a “friendly” programming language that has many facilities “to quickly develop functionalities.” HR software is the core source of truth for a company’s employee data, underpinning critical functions like payroll, benefits, and people management.