IRVINE — AI is revolutionizing businesses across the board, and an emerging Orange County company is putting it to work in revamping the age-old processes of setting fair compensation.
Irvine-based Compa, a maker of AI-driven “compensation intelligence software,” announced $35 million in Series B funding on Jan. 26.
“Compa’s mission is to make compensation fair and competitive for everyone,” company co-founder and CEO Charlie Franklin told the Business Journal on Jan. 28.
The Compa software, geared for private and public companies, is designed to replace the slow, manual methods for setting employee pay packages and to help attract talent. Compa has raised $50 million to date.
“When pay decisions are grounded in current market reality and applied consistently, fairness becomes measurable, explainable, and defensible to employees, executives, and the board,” Franklin said.
The funding round is the latest example of Orange County companies utilizing AI. AI is already in use at dozens of businesses in Orange County, including Syntiant Corp., Ingram Micro, Boeing, Amazon and Anduril Industries.
Compa’s $35 million round was led by Chicago-based Jump Capital. Other investors included Crosslink Capital, Storm Ventures, Permanent Capital, HR Tech Investments LLC (an affiliate of Indeed Inc.), and PagsGroup.
“We invested in Compa because it pairs high-quality, real-world compensation data with a disciplined approach that Fortune 50 companies already rely on and trust,” Jump Capital Partner Tarun Gupta said in a statement. “That combination gives decision-makers far better visibility and control over how pay decisions are made.”
Compa is located in a new, 10,000-square-foot office at Newport Gateway in Irvine. The company also has an office in Denver, with another site opening in San Francisco later this year.
Annual Payroll Billions
Franklin, whose education includes an executive degree from Stanford, has a deep background in tech and compensation. He spent almost four years as a compensation consultant at the global HR consulting firm Mercer, five years at Juniper Networks, where he led executive compensation and people strategy, and two years as head of People M&A and Global Mobility at Workday Inc., a cloud-based enterprise software company specializing in human capital and financial management.
In 2020, Franklin co-founded Compa with Joe Malandruccolo, a veteran of Facebook and Mercer, and Taylor Cone, who holds engineering degrees from Stanford and was director of strategy at a product innovation company called Delve.
In the past, companies relied on annual compensation surveys and spreadsheets to set pay, managing one of their largest and most scrutinized financial investments with backward-looking benchmarks. Labor market volatility is pushing company boards to demand greater precision and consistency in decisions that affect billions of dollars in annual payroll.
Compa says its “AI compensation platform helps companies compete for top talent using a network of 9 million real-time market observations, trusted by Fortune 500 enterprises.”
Compa replaces static surveys with software-delivered market data drawn directly from systems of record across its customer network.
Companies can compare what they pay for salaries, equity and incentives with their peers in the market, then leverage AI to accelerate insight discovery, surface risks and scale intelligence in real time, according to Compa.
The company says its customers include OpenAI, Stripe, Nvidia, Workday, Moderna and DoorDash.
“Compensation teams are responsible for managing multibillion-dollar portfolios in volatile markets,” said Franklin. “With stakes this high, adopting AI to help compensation experts make smarter decisions is an essential competitive mandate.”
