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Why did she raise €200M when she didn't need it? - Quiterrie Mathelin-Moreaux
5/10TL;DR
Skello, the workforce management platform for frontline employees, says it now serves businesses across six countries and is aiming to become a European leader in HR tools for shift-based work.
KEY POINTS
A decade-old HR platform for frontline work
Kitri, 34, co-founder and chief executive of Skello, launched the company 10 years ago with Emmanuel, first a friend and then a business partner. The company focuses on the daily HR needs of workers who must be physically present to do their jobs, from restaurant staff and bar workers to caregivers, pharmacy teams, supermarket employees, cleaners, factory workers and construction crews.
Planning and payroll data at the core
Skello manages staff schedules, availability, leave requests and shift swaps, while also handling administrative tasks linked to hiring and work organization. The software does not run payroll itself, but prepares and transmits payroll variables to specialist payroll systems, then retrieves pay slips. Its value proposition is to simplify a process that many small and mid-sized employers still handle manually or inconsistently.
Built for “shifted by the hour” employees
The platform is designed for hourly, shift-based roles with changing workloads across the day, such as lunch and dinner peaks in hospitality or varying staffing needs in retail and healthcare. Employers use it to place the right number of people at the right time, avoiding both understaffing during rush periods and excess labor costs in slower hours. Employees receive schedules through a mobile app and can submit requests directly there.
Complex labor law as a product challenge
Beyond matching workers to shifts, the software incorporates legal constraints that can number around 50 rules depending on the market and sector. Those include working-time rules, rest periods and sector-specific cases that are often difficult for employers to interpret. That legal layer is presented as a major reason workforce planning in Europe remains hard to automate well.
Retention is unusually long
The average customer relationship lasts eight years, a sign that workforce management software can become deeply embedded in operations once deployed. In sectors with high staff turnover, stable software retention stands out because the product becomes tied to planning habits, compliance processes and payroll preparation.
Operations in six countries and a sales cycle of 20 days
The company says it now has around 205 employees and operates in six countries, correcting an initial slip that mentioned three. It also reports a sales cycle averaging 20 days from first contact to signed customer, with roughly half of deals closing immediately after a demonstration. That is a short cycle for business software that still requires rollout inside teams.
Post-2020 divide between desk staff and field staff
The company’s positioning reflects a broader labor-market split that widened after 2020. While office workers gained access to remote work, frontline staff in hospitality, retail, healthcare and industry saw little change in the physical demands of their jobs. That gap has shaped recruitment difficulties in many sectors and reinforced demand for tools that improve predictability and day-to-day work conditions.
Targeting labor shortages in hard-to-fill sectors
Hospitality and similar sectors have struggled with severe hiring shortages, at one point missing about 300,000 workers. Those jobs are often seen as demanding, poorly valued and difficult to organize fairly. Digital planning tools are being framed not only as efficiency software, but also as a way to make schedules clearer, improve communication and help employers offer a better employee experience.
Management culture shaped by coaching
The two founders say they invested in coaching from the earliest days of the company to build their partnership and leadership style. Personality assessments and management coaching remain part of the company’s internal culture, including for a managerial group of roughly 40 people. The approach treats coaching as performance improvement and prevention, not only as a response to problems.
European expansion remains the next milestone
The founders remain majority shareholders and say the next strategic phase is to take European leadership in their category. That ambition comes with regular reassessment of whether the current leadership team remains the right fit for each new stage of growth. For now, the founders say they are fully committed to the next cycle of expansion.
CONCLUSION
Skello is betting that better scheduling, stronger compliance and simpler HR administration can modernize some of the economy’s toughest frontline jobs. Its next test is whether that model can scale from a strong domestic base into lasting European leadership.
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