HR was never meant to run a ticket queue
For the past decade, People Operations teams have quietly become the coordination engine of modern companies.
Every policy update. Every onboarding. Every promotion. It all flows through HR.
And as headcount scales, the volume becomes impossible to ignore. Hundreds of requests landing every week:
“I need to request LOA starting next month.”
“I need an employment verification letter.”
“My payslip looks wrong.”
“I still can’t access the system”
“My manager changed. Can you update reporting lines?”
Each one of these is small, but collectively time-consuming.
So teams adapted.
Some borrowed IT ticketing systems. Others deployed chatbots in Slack or Teams. All with good intentions: keep things organized, reduce the bottleneck, stop HR from becoming a 24/7 helpdesk.
But neither solution actually solved the problem.
Ticketing systems organized the queue but they didn't shrink it. Chatbots could surface a link, but they couldn't complete the task. The tools evolved. The operating model didn't. People teams remained the manual routing layer, stitching together requests across HRIS platforms, spreadsheets, email, and Slack.
AI has changed the equation.
From managing requests to completing work
Today, we're announcing our $7M Seed round led by AlbionVC, alongside PROfounders Capital, Ascension, Emerge and angel investors including Tony Jamous, Founder of OysterHR, and Saurav Chopra, Founder of 5Mins and Perkbox.
We raised this round because we believe the real opportunity in the age of AI isn't at the surface, where new agents and point solutions are launching every month, but in the orchestration layer that makes execution reliable at scale.
The first wave of AI in HR focused on information retrieval: faster answers, smarter search, chat-based interfaces. But answering questions is not the same as completing work.
As Jeet Mukerji, Co-founder and CEO of Kinfolk, puts it: "HR teams are stuck in a cycle of manual admin and legacy tools are failing them. They're forced to choose between clunky ticketing systems that slow down work, or standalone chatbots that don’t get real work done. We built Kinfolk to break this cycle. By shifting from manual coordination to autonomous execution, we let HR teams scale their operations and focus on the strategic work that drives company growth."
Kinfolk's AI agents execute workflows directly inside Slack. They draft letters, update HRIS records, kick off processes, book meetings, connect people, manage lifecycle changes, and coordinate approvals autonomously across systems.
Our customers report that up to 70% of Tier 0–1 employee requests are now handled without human intervention, reclaiming roughly 45 days per year for HR teams.
Building the orchestration layer for Workforce Operations
Application layers fragment. Models improve. Agents evolve and get replaced. But the durable advantage lies in deep domain context, structured governance, and system integrations that allow AI to perform work safely and reliably inside complex organizations.
Employees don't think in departmental silos. They simply want problems solved, and whether that sits with HR, IT, payroll, or workplace operations is irrelevant to them. Kinfolk replaces fragmented coordination with a single orchestration layer that sits across domains and moves things forward.
People teams spend less time manually chasing and processing basic requests, and more time on performance, culture, and the work that needs human judgment.
Over time, this orchestration layer becomes the control plane for Workforce Operations.
HR was meant to build great companies
We're starting in HR. This investment allows us to deepen our agentic capabilities, expand enterprise readiness, and grow toward a broader Workforce Operations platform.
The next generation of high-performing organizations won't be built on better ticket queues. They'll be built on better orchestration, where scaling revenue no longer means scaling administrative coordination. And where People teams can operate as true strategic partners to the business.
HR was never meant to run a ticket queue. It was meant to build great companies.
We're here to help you do exactly that.