A small team, mostly engineers, building the HR platform we wished existed. We took it global because the problem isn't local.
In 2024, the founders were running engineering teams at fintech companies in Cape Town. BambooHR was too American. Sage was a relic. Spreadsheets were a liability. The right tool didn't exist.
We started building hiFlo for ourselves — a clean record, BCEA-aware defaults, an AI that took action rather than answered. By the time we had ten customers, we were quietly automating the bits of HR that everyone hated. By thirty, we knew Flo had to be the centre of the product.
The company has stayed small on purpose. Engineering-led. Customer-led. The HR you'd want, made by people who actually run teams.
A row-level security policy is more honest than a privacy promise. We build HR like we built our last database.
The best HR tool is the one you forget is there. We optimize for the things you do once and never touch again.
AI drafts, retrieves, synthesizes. Humans decide who gets hired, promoted, paid more, let go. That line is in the architecture.
We started in Cape Town because the SA HR stack was broken. Localized POPIA, BCEA, SARS, languages. Then we did the same for every market we landed in.
Every Flo action, every data change, every login — logged with an actor, a timestamp, a reason. You can replay any decision.
Under 10 employees, forever free. The work of running a small business is hard enough.
The company is built remote-first. We get together quarterly in Cape Town.
HQ · 14 people · engineering, design, leadership
4 people · customer, sales
3 people · sales · EU expansion
2 people · engineering · nairobi, lisbon
“We talked to every HR tool on the market. hiFlo was the only one where the engineering felt like engineering and the AI felt like a colleague.”
Start free under 10 employees, forever. Or talk to us about a team trial.