Compensation comparison startup Pave just quadrupled its valuation to $1.6 billion. Here’s the 16-slide pitch deck it used to raise $100 million from Index Ventures and A16z.


Matt Schulman, Pave founder and CEO

  • Pave, a startup that helps companies compare salaries to industry norms, just raised $100 million.
  • The Series C round was led by Index Ventures with US giant Andreessen Horowitz also participating.
  • The fresh funds will be used to bolster its headcount and expand across Europe.

A startup that enables companies like Allbirds and Hubspot to benchmark their compensation packages against industry norms has raised $100 million in a deal that quadrupled its valuation.

San Francisco-based Pave, which was founded in 2019 by former Facebook engineer Matt Schulman, collates salary data from a raft of different sources to visualize how a business’ pay and conditions compare to others. Pave then integrates with HR tools to help communicate the comparison to employees.

A mix of post-COVID-19 labor shortages, the great resignation, and the hundreds of millions of dollars of investor cash that has been pumped into compensation tools for employers has helped drive demand for Pave’s services.

“There are so many marketplaces out there, for the price of homes, stocks, bonds but the labour market has no real time price,” Schulman told Insider. “There’s been a massive increase in the cost of labour, I don’t think the world has ever seen anything so dramatic and venture capital deployment has been leading this.”

The Series C round was led by Index Ventures, which has previously backed the likes of Revolut and Roblox. Andreessen Horowitz, the YC Continuity Fund, and LocalGlobe all invested in the deal that values the business at $1.6 billion having raised at $400 million in August. Further participation in the round came from Original Capital, Backend Capital and Contrary Capital.

Pave will also acquire Advanced-HR from Morgan Stanley, which manages compensation mapping company Option Impact, as part of the deal. The company is planning to double down on Europe as part of the funding round.

Schulman said getting more private company data was crucial to the success of Pave and that there were still plenty of gaps to fill. He said the business was “on a quest to fill these holes because this platform is supremely valuable for the ecosystem.”

Pave has raised $163 million to date in less than three years, but this round was more difficult than earlier fundraising, Schulman said.

“Investors care more about efficient growth, rather than growth at all costs so it was a different dynamic to the past with more focus on s.”

Pave aims to grow its team to around 250 staff by the end of this year, increasing to over 300 in 2023. Schulman was more bullish about the company’s prospects rather than its new unicorn status.

“I care about the fact that there are 8 billion people in the world with 4 billion in the labour market and a lot of it is a guessing game on compensation,” he added. “It makes me excited that it’s our addressable market, this is a small step on our journey, we want to be a trillion-dollar business one day.”

Check out Pave’s 16-slide pitch deck below:



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