From Failed Job Board to Payroll Giant: The SeamlessHR Story
SeamlessHR helps African companies manage people, payroll, and performance—from onboarding to exit.
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The "Why" Behind SeamlessHR
When people think of innovation, their minds often drift to shiny objects, apps with seamless swipes, products that promise overnight transformation, or buzzwords that trend for a season. But real innovation? It’s rarely glamorous. It’s born in the friction experienced by real companies trying to solve real problems. This is the story of how SeamlessHR began.
For many African businesses, that friction was everywhere, but especially in HR. Managers wrestled with spreadsheets that broke under pressure, processes that lived in dusty file cabinets, and payroll systems that ran on memory, not accuracy. Companies were full of energy and ambition, but internally, things were falling apart. People were doing their best, but the systems were failing them.
As such, (simple?) issues like payroll were either outsourced at great cost or run on a wing and a prayer. Local companies that could afford it had to invest in imported software designed for foreign markets and retrofit their systems to accommodate things like Nigeria’s PAYE or Kenya’s NHIF deductions. Many of the others that couldn’t, died.
Infact, according to a report by Weetracker, between 2010 and 2018, 61% of startups in Nigeria founded in or after 2010 shut down, with factors like poor or non-existent structures for managing Human Resources listed among the underlying causes.
Therefore, it was obvious that African businesses didn’t need more talent—they had that in spades. What they needed was infrastructure and localized software that understood their language, laws, and complexity. Two young Nigerians, Dr. Emmanuel Okeleji and ‘Deji Lana, built SeamlessHR to fill that gap.
It started in a living room—with two Nigerians, two laptops, and a difficult problem no one else wanted to touch.
Dr. Emmanuel Okeleji had always been surrounded by entrepreneurs. His father often brought boardroom talk home, and as a boy, Emmanuel listened in. He was trained as a medical doctor, but by the end of medical school, Emmanuel had gone through a Goldman Sachs investment banking internship and kicked off an incorporated software development company alongside his current co-founder, ‘Deji Lana.
Deji was a brilliant software engineer with a knack for building reliable systems, and they met while studying at Obafemi Awolowo varsity. Together, they held a shared mission to help African businesses optimise their resources to be more productive and successful by streamlining HR processes with a modern all-in-one HR software that leaves nothing out of the cycle; think employee recruitment, onboarding, retention, and exit.
“We went into this because we want employers to be able to optimise and make better decisions when it comes to their workforce.” shared ‘Deji Lana, co-founder and CTO, SeamlessHR. He added in a separate interview, “Our model is software. Instead of businesses to build different tools or use different technology to improve their workforce or their resources either human, financial resources or other assets, we do that for them. All that is needed to do is to log into our software or engage with us so that they can focus on the core of their businesses as either banking, oil and gas, healthcare, manufacturing etc.”
That insight changed everything.
They began mapping out the pain points across the employee lifecycle from slow, outdated recruitment models to non-localized compliance frameworks, and in 2018 (after years of learning, failing, building, and unlearning), they launched SeamlessHR.
Building and Launching the Product
From a modest living room in Lagos, Nigeria, the seeds of what would later become SeamlessHR were first sown. Emmanuel and ‘Deji weren’t just building a startup; they were navigating a mission, albeit without knowing exactly where it would lead.
In 2012, they launched Insidify, a bold attempt to rethink how job seekers and employers connected across Africa. Coined from the words “inside” and “identify”, the name reflected their vision: a platform that gave people an inside track to opportunities, and helped employers identify talent, a sort of “Google for jobs” across the continent.
On the surface, Insidify resembled other job aggregators like Jobberman, but the ambition ran deeper. The goal wasn’t simply to match CVs to vacancies. Emmanuel and ‘Deji envisioned a professional network that would do more; one that would dig into the roots of employability, access, and recruitment across emerging markets.
For five years, they built and ran Insidify with tenacity, gaining firsthand insight into the complexities of Africa’s labour market. But what became painfully clear over time was that you can’t monetize unemployment. The people who needed the platform the most—the job seekers—couldn’t afford to pay for access. And the employers, facing their own inefficiencies and structural issues, weren't seeing the long-term value just yet.
Dr. Emmanuel, CEO and Co-Founder of SeamlessHR, said, “We ran it from 2012 to 2017 (but) it did not go very well because unemployment in Africa is tricky. It is not easy to monetise when people don’t have money. Job seekers don’t have money, so you can’t take money where there is no money. In 2017/2018, we began to change..”
What they discovered was simple but significant: the real problem wasn’t just hiring people; it was managing them once hired. Most companies, even large institutions, lacked the systems to do this effectively. HR processes were fractured, payroll was error-prone, leave tracking was manual, and performance evaluations were ad hoc at best. The landscape was not just underserved—it was almost entirely ignored.
They decided that their next product would not be another consumer-facing tool. It would be an enterprise-grade solution that tackled the “boring” back-office work that keeps companies running. But to succeed, they knew the platform had to be more than just another software.
The ATS was where SeamlessHR began, and it was built to digitize the recruitment journey from job posting to offer letter. Sterling Bank was their first major client to adopt the tool, a significant win that allowed the team to test their assumptions in a high-pressure, real-world environment. The feedback from that experience didn’t just shape the ATS—it set the tone for how every product module would be built: in partnership with real users, embedded in real workflows, and tested against real business constraints.
In 2019, they moved on to employee record management. HR departments across Africa often kept employee files in cabinets—physical folders stacked in dusty corners, inaccessible during audits or policy changes.
SeamlessHR created a centralized, cloud-based system for storing employee data, configurable by role, department, and location. But the real turning point came in 2020, when SeamlessHR introduced its payroll engine. Payroll is the beating heart of every company—it must be precise, timely, compliant, and adaptable. Getting it wrong can trigger employee unrest, legal sanctions, or financial chaos.
Building a payroll system that works in Nigeria, where tax laws, pension deductions, union dues, and employee benefits vary not just by sector but by state, required painstaking research and tight collaboration with compliance experts.
SeamlessHR’s payroll tool was built to handle all of it: multiple pay schedules, currency formats, tax brackets, NHF, NHIS, ITF, and direct bank integration for salary disbursement. It didn’t just automate calculations; it transformed payroll from a stressful, error-prone monthly ritual into a trusted process companies could rely on.
Over time, the platform expanded its capabilities. Performance management was next, allowing companies to set goals, conduct appraisals, track KPIs, and document feedback. By 2023, the company wasn’t just building HR tools—it was shaping business strategy.
What set SeamlessHR apart during all this was its obsessive attention to local compliance. The software wasn’t just translated or localized—it was built ground-up for each market. Throughout the development journey, the team resisted the pressure to launch prematurely or compete on features alone. Instead, they focused on reliability, uptime, auditability, and data security.
By the time SeamlessHR became the go-to HR platform for PwC, AXA Mansard, Wema Bank, Lagos Business School, and hundreds of African companies, it had earned that status not through ads or virality, but by doing the hard, patient work of building deep infrastructure.
Achieving Product-Market Fit
Dr. Emmanuel Okeleji and ‘Deji Lana, immersed themselves in the real-world practices of HR departments across Nigeria. They sat with operations managers at oil companies, watched how leave was processed in banks, followed payroll runs at small retail shops, and talked to HR heads juggling regulatory filings in chaotic offices.
This discovery shaped their strategy and its first MVP: The Applicant Tracking System (ATS)—a lean, focused tool that embedded itself inside real recruitment processes. But they didn’t stop there. The feedback they received—about access, storage, audit trails, and compliance—led them to rethink how organizations handled all employee data.
The result? A centralized, cloud-based HR management system that did more than digitize paper records. It created structure. No more dusty cabinets, no more disappearing files during audits, no more regulatory blind spots. And because it was configurable by role, it could reflect the complexity of real organizations.
This foundational focus on actual workflow and local compliance became SeamlessHR’s product philosophy. As Dr. Emmanuel puts it, “What helped us is that first of all, we wanted to be an institution. Our goal wasn’t just to make money and live like ballers. That was not our goal. Our goal was to build a proper institution.”
That mentality—the long game—led to a product that didn’t just automate HR but became essential infrastructure grew SeamlessHR into a full software-as-a-service with two core plans:
Core HR allowed businesses to manage employee information, automate payroll, process leave, track attendance, generate reports, and allow for varying access levels via a self-service model.
Premium HR added advanced capabilities like disciplinary and grievance management, exit and severance tools, and detailed analytics, all in addition to mobile access and deeper compliance modules.
Moreover, the software wasn’t just adapted to Africa—it was built for Africa. Tax systems, pension structures, severance laws, and employee benefits vary across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and other countries where SeamlessHR now operates. The team didn’t simply localize one product across markets; its integration strategy ensured they could plug in with tools like QuickBooks without friction. And should a glitch arise, the support team was one message away.
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Go-To-Market Strategy
SeamlessHR’s market entry was deliberate, grounded, and deeply attuned to how businesses in Africa operate. Emmanuel and Deji understood that HR wasn’t a glamorous function, but it was critical. More importantly, they realized that many organizations—particularly mid-sized to large enterprises—would rather leave managing HR to an expert body so they could focus on their own core business. This insight became the foundation of their go-to-market strategy.
And so, rather than targeting every company they could find, SeamlessHR sought out businesses whose primary function wasn’t people operations, but who still required robust, compliant, and adaptable HR infrastructure to scale.
These were companies that had real business to do—banks, oil and gas firms, logistics providers—and needed HR to be reliable, automated, and invisible and soon after, they landed their first client–Sterling Bank, a forward-looking Nigerian banking institution with innovation at its core.
Sterling Bank did not want to build HR systems from scratch or keep tweaking legacy processes. They wanted a partner who already understood the terrain, and SeamlessHR had spent years building to own that space—It was a match made in heaven!
Yet, that was not all. SeamlessHR’s software made it easy for such businesses to manage employees across the entire lifecycle, with seamless integration to ERPs and mobile access. The Core HR and Premium HR subscription tiers made onboarding into the platform easier for businesses at different stages.
Startups and smaller companies could begin with the essentials—payroll, leave management, and data access control—while larger enterprises leveraged more sophisticated features like disciplinary tracking, severance workflows, and advanced HR analytics. Both tiers were available with mobile functionality and integration into popular accounting software, making the platform feel like a natural extension of the business’s existing workflow.
“Our model is software. Instead of businesses to build different tools or use different technology to improve their workforce or their resources either human, financial resources or other assets, we do that for them. All that is needed to do is to log into our software or engage with us so that they can focus on the core of their businesses as either banking, oil and gas, healthcare, manufacturing etc.” – ’Deji Lana, CTO/Co-Founder, SeamlessHR.
That guiding belief shaped how SeamlessHR approached the market with its product. Their GTM playbook didn’t rely on hype. It was built on product strength, institutional ambition, and the clarity of a single goal: to become the trusted infrastructure for how African businesses manage people.
User Base and Revenue
While SeamlessHR has quietly powered the operations of several notable brands across sectors, its total user base remains undisclosed. However, what is publicly known is that SeamlessHR’s client portfolio includes industry leaders like Sterling Bank, eTranzact, Sanlam, MTN, FCMB, Lake Turkana, PiggyVest, along with dozens of other medium to large organizations spread across multiple African markets.
The company has taken a pragmatic, revenue-first approach. SeamlessHR operates a subscription-based model, charging customers per staff per month, which means revenue scales proportionally with company size. This approach aligns perfectly with their client base—HR teams managing 50 to 5,000 employees, allowing the software to grow with the organization’s needs.
According to the official website, SeamlessHR offers four main pricing tiers: Lite, Core, Advantage, and Custom. Mobile support is available for all plans, making it easy for employees and HR personnel to manage processes on the go and with $500 million processed in payroll for its client base in 2023 alone, the numbers allude to its genius.
Fundraising Efforts
In 2019, SeamlessHR secured its first pre-seed investment, with Tofino Capital contributing $150,000. This early capital helped grow the team and sharpen product focus. By 2020, the startup closed a seed round led by Lateral Capital and Consonance Investment Managers, with participation from Ingressive Capital and Enza Capital—paving the way for expansion across Anglophone Africa.
The big leap came in January 2022, when SeamlessHR raised $10 million in Series A funding. Led by TLcom Capital and backed by Capria Ventures, this round enabled the company to deepen product development, expand into Kenya and Southern Africa, and invest in new offerings like Earned Wage Access, in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In January 2025, SeamlessHR raised an additional $9 million in a Series A extension, led by the Gates Foundation and Helios Digital Ventures, bringing the total funding to over $20 million. This latest round is fueling further growth across the continent, with expansion, embedded finance, and even acquisitions on the table.
What’s Next for SeamlessHR in 2025?
With operations firmly rooted in West and East Africa, SeamlessHR is setting its sights on Southern Africa and North Africa, with South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, and Egypt on the expansion roadmap. Each new market represents not just an addressable audience, but a chance to build infrastructure where none existed—and to localize HR systems that respect the nuances of regulation, culture, and scale.
One of the most ambitious elements of their 2025 plan is the deeper integration of embedded finance. Having already launched features like Earned Wage Access and a financial wellness suite, SeamlessHR is looking to offer credit and other financial tools that sit within the same platform where HR and payroll live. The vision? A workplace operating system that doesn’t just manage people but empowers them.
☝🏽 A personal note:
I haven’t actively used SeamlessHR myself. However, I have worked at a company with a similar focus, especially regarding hiring, onboarding, payroll, and other HR processes important to business growth. Also, I have been an employee in several other companies, a handful of which struggled with their HR department, so I know firsthand how frustrating it can be when those systems don’t work as they should.
From late salary alerts to clunky onboarding or unclear leave requests, I’ve experienced it all. And honestly, those experiences have changed how I approach work today. I care more about the process and pay more attention to the employee experience because I know what happens when people are left in the dark, made to feel invisible, or not promptly/properly compensated for the work they do.
So when I came across SeamlessHR’s story, it resonated. It wasn’t built for headlines or hype. It was built to fix what breaks inside organisations. And it does so with quiet consistency, helping businesses manage people properly and letting employees focus on their job. That’s why this story matters. It’s a reminder that infrastructure isn’t just about roads and tech. It’s also about the systems behind how people work, get paid, grow, and thrive.
If you care about structure, want to pay your people right and on time, and need a system that grows with you, SeamlessHR is your best bet. It's not just HR software; it’s infrastructure for African businesses.
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