SAN FRANCISCO—-CandorIQ, the AI-powered platform transforming how organizations plan and manage people spend, today announced a $4.8 million seed funding round led by Array Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, CRV, and Switch Ventures. The funding will be used to grow CandorIQ’s engineering and go-to-market teams, accelerate product development, and expand the platform’s AI capabilities across compensation and workforce planning workflows.
CandorIQ’s AI capabilities are embedded across the platform, helping teams surface insights, flag potential risks, and automate complex workflows that would otherwise require days of manual effort. From automating compensation outliers to modeling headcount scenarios, the AI agents act as an always-on partner for HR and Finance teams navigating fast-moving organizational dynamics.
Staying aligned on compensation and headcount planning has long felt like a losing battle. Teams are forced to toggle between spreadsheets, siloed systems, and disconnected workflows, slowing decisions and introducing risk. Despite people spend accounting for 70% of employer costs according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, it’s still one of the least strategically managed. Compensation workflows are often fragmented across teams and tools, with no unified system of record.
That challenge has only intensified in recent years, as companies swing between aggressive hiring and cost-cutting and raise the stakes for every comp and headcount decision. CandorIQ replaces that complexity with a collaborative, AI-powered platform that unifies compensation, headcount planning, benchmarking, and equity strategy. The result is not just operational efficiency, but a more strategic, transparent approach to workforce planning that aligns leadership around clear, data-backed decisions.
“Workforce planning shouldn’t feel like a quarterly fire drill,” said Haris Ikram, Co-Founder and CEO of CandorIQ. “We built CandorIQ to help companies make smarter, faster people decisions by putting HR, Finance, and leadership on the same page, with the same data.”
Organizations like Newfront, SmartRecruiters, Monte Carlo, and Fleetio rely on CandorIQ to support high-impact initiatives from compensation reviews to dynamic scenario planning. Its AI agents also help teams surface critical insights faster, reduce manual analysis, and proactively guide decisions before issues escalate.
The platform has helped customers accelerate merit cycles by 2.5x, cut hiring timelines in half, and reduce employee churn by up to 25%—delivering average annual savings of more than $500,000. Whether it’s identifying top performers at risk of churn or ensuring pay equity across teams, CandorIQ automates what used to take hours of manual work.
CandorIQ also integrates with more than 100 HR and Finance tools, pulling fragmented data into a centralized decision-making layer. Instead of relying on consultants or cobbling together insights from disconnected systems, teams get real-time answers they can trust, whether they’re building budgets, structuring offers, or navigating a merit cycle.
“Compensation is both one of the biggest cost centers inside a company and one of the least well-managed,” said Shruti Gandhi, partner at Array Ventures. “CandorIQ is bringing clarity, automation, and accountability to a space that’s been held together by spreadsheets for too long.”
As companies scale, so do the risks of fragmented planning and inconsistent decision-making. CandorIQ helps eliminate these blind spots by aligning HR and Finance around a shared system of record. Its platform enables leaders to act with greater confidence and use data to guide every compensation and workforce strategy decision, from offers to organizational design.
For more information about CandorIQ or to request a demo, visit our website.
