Factorial was born from a simple but powerful conviction: HR professionals spend too much time buried in spreadsheets and manual processes, and not nearly enough time on the people they're there to support. We set out to change that — by building a complete, intelligent HR and payroll platform that genuinely gives time back.
"HR teams were drowning in admin. We decided to build the tool that would finally let them come up for air."
In the early days of Factorial, our founders watched talented HR professionals spend their most productive hours on tasks that software should have been handling years earlier — chasing signatures, manually calculating time off, exporting spreadsheets just to answer a manager's basic question. It wasn't a people problem. It was a tools problem.
So we built Factorial: a single, unified platform covering the full HR and payroll lifecycle — from the moment a candidate applies to the day an employee retires. No data silos. No switching between five tools. No version-control nightmares. Just one clean, intelligent system that works the way modern HR teams actually think.
Today we're the first HR platform to embed a native generative AI agent — not a bolt-on chatbot, but a deeply integrated intelligence that guides performance reviews, surfaces workforce insights, automates routine decisions, and lets HR leaders spend their day on strategy instead of administration.
Every feature we ship, every design decision we make, and every line of code we write is guided by one north star: putting the human back into Human Resources. That means less admin, more empathy — and technology that serves people, not the other way around.
Complex problems deserve elegant solutions. We refuse to ship features that create more work than they save. Every workflow in Factorial is designed to feel obvious on day one — no training manuals required.
HR software exists to serve people, not the other way around. We build with empathy for HR managers, employees, CFOs, and managers alike — because every stakeholder deserves a tool built for them specifically.
We ship, learn, and improve — constantly. Customer feedback isn't a quarterly ritual; it's embedded in our daily product cycle. When you tell us something's broken or missing, we listen and we act.
HR data is sensitive. We treat it that way — with enterprise-grade security, LGPD and GDPR compliance, rigorous access controls, and a no-surprises approach to pricing and contracts.
A decade of building, growing, and — most importantly — listening to the HR professionals who use Factorial every day.
Three co-founders — frustrated by the clunky, expensive HR tools on the market — set out to build a genuinely modern alternative. The initial focus is small and mid-sized businesses who can't afford enterprise-grade software but deserve enterprise-grade capability.
The platform expands well beyond its original leave-management roots. Full payroll processing, electronic time-punch recording, and a digital document vault launch together — establishing Factorial as a genuine all-in-one HR suite rather than a point solution.
With fresh backing from key investors, Factorial opens offices in Portugal and Latin America, hires its first dedicated customer success teams, and crosses the milestone of 1,000 active business customers — validating the product-market fit the team had worked towards for six years.
Factorial becomes one of Spain's most successful tech companies, joining a select group of European HR-tech unicorns. The round funds a major engineering push, including the early groundwork for what will become Factorial AI — the industry's first truly native generative AI integration in an HR platform.
We release Factorial AI to all customers: an intelligent assistant that automates performance review cycles, surfaces real-time workforce analytics, drafts HR communications, and flags compliance risks before they become problems. Not a feature. A new way of working.
Factorial operates across more than 10 countries, with a team of over 1,000 people across Barcelona, Lisbon, São Paulo, Mexico City, and Miami. We're still the same company we were in 2013 — just a lot bigger, a lot smarter, and even more committed to putting HR professionals where they belong: focused on their people.
There's a reason Factorial customers consistently rate us above 4.5 stars on every major software review platform. It's not luck. It's a deliberate methodology — three principles that inform everything from our product roadmap to how we handle a 3am support ticket.
Every product decision begins with a real scenario: a payroll manager needs to close month-end in under two hours. A line manager needs to submit a holiday approval from their phone in 30 seconds. We design for the job, not for the feature list on a competitor's pricing page.
Factorial's architecture is designed to be a single source of truth — not a collection of modules that happen to share a logo. An employee record created during recruiting flows automatically into onboarding, payroll, time management, and performance, with zero re-entry. Data entered once stays correct everywhere.
We built Factorial AI with a strict test: does this genuinely save an HR professional meaningful time? If it's just a demo trick, it doesn't ship. Our AI handles performance-review cycles, generates HR reports from natural-language questions, and flags anomalies in time and attendance data — because those are the tasks that actually eat people's days.
We're proud of the numbers — but what we're really proud of is what they represent: thousands of HR teams who've reclaimed their time and refocused on their people.
Trusted, certified and awarded
Building great HR software requires more than engineers and designers. It takes people who've worked in HR, run payroll, handled compliance audits, and sat in the room when a company had to restructure. Our team reflects that reality.
We hire for curiosity, empathy, and craft. We believe that the people who build tools for HR professionals should understand what it actually feels like to be one — the Monday morning inbox, the end-of-month pressure, the one employee question that takes three phone calls to answer. That lived understanding is baked into every screen we design.
Across Barcelona, Lisbon, São Paulo, Mexico City, and Miami, our teams work in small, autonomous squads aligned around customer outcomes. We measure ourselves not on features shipped but on time saved and problems solved for the people using Factorial every day.
Our offices aren't outposts — they're real hubs with local product, engineering, and customer success expertise. We serve each market with people who understand it from the inside.
We run the same performance management and development cycles we build into Factorial. Every team member has clear goals, regular feedback, and structured development conversations — no performance theatre.
We use Factorial AI to run our own HR. That's not a marketing line — it's how we find real bugs, surface real improvements, and ensure that what we ship holds up under the demands of a 1,000-person organisation.
As featured in and awarded by
Factorial has raised over $120M from investors who share our conviction that the HR software market is ripe for transformation. Our backers bring deep experience in enterprise SaaS, HR technology, and scaling global B2B platforms — and they hold us to the same rigorous standards we hold ourselves to.
That backing gives us the long-term stability our customers rely on. No pivots, no acqui-hires, no sunsetting of features you've built your workflows around. We're here for the long run.
We're not shy about it. When you look at what Factorial delivers — the breadth of the platform, the quality of the AI, the depth of local compliance support, and the responsiveness of the team — the question isn't why Factorial, it's why you'd choose anything else.
But don't take our word for it. The companies using Factorial average a 67% reduction in time spent on HR admin within the first 90 days. Their HR teams switch from reactive to strategic. Their managers actually use self-service tools. And their employees feel the difference.
From recruitment and onboarding through time tracking, payroll, performance management, and expense control — it's all in Factorial, all connected, and all working from a single employee record. No integrations to maintain, no data reconciliation headaches.
Factorial AI automates performance review cycles with structured, bias-aware guidance, answers HR questions in plain language, generates workforce reports from natural prompts, and flags time and attendance anomalies before they become payroll errors. It's useful on day one.
Brazilian CLT, Spanish labour law, Portuguese working time regulations — Factorial maintains deep, continuously updated local compliance models across every country we operate in. You don't need a specialist lawyer on retainer to close payroll correctly.
Our implementation and support teams aren't a call centre — they're HR specialists who understand the problems you're actually solving. Average first-response time under two hours. Onboarding completed in under three weeks. A dedicated CSM for every account above 50 seats.
Ready to simplify your HR?
Start a free trial today — no credit card, no implementation fees, no lock-in. Or book a 30-minute personalised demo and we'll show you exactly what Factorial looks like for a company your size, in your industry, with your specific challenges.