Employee Central was founded in 2019 by people who'd spent the previous decade building HR products for other companies. We thought we could do better. We've spent the last five years finding out.
Our founders met at a software company in Munich in 2016. They worked on different teams, shipping different parts of the same enterprise HR product, and they kept running into the same complaint from customers: the platform was capable, but using it was joyless. The HR team avoided opening it. Managers asked their HRBP to do things they could have done themselves.
By 2019 they'd left, moved to Berlin, and started Employee Central with a clear thesis: an HRIS for the mid-market should feel like a calm, considered tool — not a heavy enterprise platform watered down. We launched in 2020 with five customers in the DACH region. By the end of 2024 we were serving teams across DACH, the UK, the Nordics, Iberia, and Benelux.
A team of about forty, headquartered in Mitte, Berlin, with members in Hamburg, Zürich, Lisbon, and Tallinn.
Previously product lead at a major HR platform. Built the time-off module that's now in production at thousands of companies. Lives in Prenzlauer Berg.
Spent eight years working on enterprise HR engineering before leaving to build something that could move faster. Hates ambiguous error messages.
Headquartered at Torstraße 35, 10119 Berlin, Germany. We hire people who care about craft, who can write a clear sentence, and who treat HR work as legitimate craft of its own.
SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR by design. We're a German GmbH and our DPO is on payroll, not outsourced. Data residency: Frankfurt, Dublin, or London. Sub-processor list and DPA available on request.