To attract and retain the best employees in a competitive market for talent, many companies have expanded their benefits beyond traditional services like healthcare and retirement plans, adding emotional health support, employee engagement experiences, enhanced training, and more. With more offerings to manage, Human Resources teams often turn to Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. In fact, the average company now has 130 overall SaaS vendors, up 1,500% from 2015.
Erik Adjei, Co-Founder, Aragorn
Ed Adjei is a co-founder of a startup at the forefront of solving how to integrate these solutions. Adjei’s company is called Aragorn and it helps enterprises seamlessly sync HR information with vendor systems. For example, Aragorn could help integrate employee job performance and skill sets with a vendor that provides enhanced training.
Aragorn uses an AI-driven approach for integrations, predictive data mappings, and error handling that automates and secures what can be a laborious process. For instance, if someone inputs the wrong number, it can detect and help rectify the issue quickly. Aragorn also features a cloud marketplace with pre-built connectors, enabling swift, secure employee data synchronization between HR systems.
“Aragorn is uniquely positioned to be the glue between your people ops, IT teams, and all your downstream vendor systems so integrations run smoothly and finish quickly,” said Adjei.
Along with speed and efficiency, data security is a crucial aspect of the company’s service. Aragorn claims to ensure that sensitive information remains encrypted.
Joining Forces with Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs
Adjei believes his solution can be a game-changer for enterprises — and that led him to join nine other companies in the Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs Accelerator: Enterprise AI in the fall of 2023. The six-week program connected founders with executives at Comcast NBCUniversal to explore potential pilot programs and partnership deals. It also provided insights into enterprise sales in large companies and facilitated connections with seasoned AI professionals.
For Adjei, participating in this program was a golden opportunity to align with leaders in HR and IT at Comcast, a learning experience that is not easy for a startup to facilitate on its own.
“Comcast LIFT Labs helped chart the path for us to accelerate our growth and learn from an enterprise to gain insights into the vendor integration process as well as how a platform like ours is evaluated,” he said.
A Family Venture
Adjei launched the company alongside siblings Gladys and Eric. They each worked at organizations that manually formatted data for vendor partnerships and noticed that the process could be inefficient. With Ed’s experience building over 700 HR data integrations and recognizing the time-consuming nature of preparing client data, the trio embarked on creating a solution.
Gladys Adjei, Co-Founder & Head of Product, Aragorn
Aragorn’s impact has been substantial. The startup was accepted into Y Combinator and attracted big-name clients such as Keurig Dr. Pepper. The company’s solution has helped many companies including financial services firm Plaid, which saved $200,000 per year and over 1,800 hours annually, according to Adjei.
As HR information systems and SaaS platforms continue to gain prominence, Aragorn is poised to redefine integration for people operations and IT.