Investing In Employee Happiness & Engagement

We are delighted to announce that The Happiness Index recently completed a seed round and raised £1,060,000 funding from angel investors to continue the growth of our employee engagement and happiness platform.

Investing in happiness

How Happiness Is Putting Emotions Back Into The Employee Engagement Sector


When we started this company, our purpose was to help businesses create a thriving culture that balances people with profit. The aim was to help organisations understand and improve the happiness, wellbeing and productivity of their people. We now have 10 million+ data points, from employees across 95 countries. Our technology has been adopted by some of the biggest brands in the world; Unilever, Sodexo (17th largest employer globally), M&C Saatchi, RAC and many more.


Our customers trust us to empower them to find the common themes and reasons for employee engagement and happiness within their companies. We’re delighted that these amazing investors see the value in our work too, and have helped us to supercharge our mission!


Here’s a quote from the Co-Founder and Co-CEO Matt Phelan:

“I have never led a funding round before and I had no idea what I was doing but I thoroughly enjoyed meeting our potential investors and sharing our vision with them. Having read many generic and boring investment press releases before, I thought I would simply share with you why some of the angels invested. Here you go…”


So, Why Did They Invest?


FIONA MCDONNELL | Director at Amazon

“I have experienced first hand, the power of data to drive changes in engagement and diversity, so the chance to invest in the drive to unlock happiness too was very appealing. The team at The Happiness Index have the passion to succeed and I believe now is the perfect moment to get behind data as a force for good!”


GEMMA SHAMBLER | Head of People at The Happiness Index


“As an employee at The Happiness Index, I wholeheartedly believe in the vision of THI and believe that the team can achieve success through their Mission 2026. This is a really exciting time for the company as the pandemic has provided an opportunity for THI to raise their profile in the market giving them the opportunity to become global leaders in the ‘Happiness’ category. I, therefore, saw this as the perfect time to support their journey through investment.”


JULIUS EWIG | Tech Investor


“I believe that we need to empower our employees and to give them a voice. It’s not enough to offer free breakfast once a week or having a pool table! It’s inevitable if you want to succeed to start listening to your people and I see the potential for the German market.”


ALEX MARTINEZ | Co-Founder at Supplier Day


“When people are happy they do their best work. Great work leads to incredible accomplishments. This is an opportunity to support a business that’s genuinely trying to change the way companies think about this.”


MARK HAMMOND | Founder & Investor


“The Happiness index feels like such a relevant opportunity for all businesses to trade ethically and responsibly on an emotional level. The data supports the approach that a happier team leads to more positive outcomes for the individual, the team they function within and the businesses in general. A happier, more dynamic, more profitable business sounds like the ultimate goal and I’m proud to be supporting the important next step to allow the Happiness Index to increase its scale and reach.”


JACKIE DYAL | Human Experience Director at The Happiness Index


“I work at The Happiness Index and decided to invest because I can see how we are pioneering a fundamental and powerful change in combining the heart and the mind to help humans thrive in the workplace. The neuroscience and quantum physics work we have done behind the scenes is going to completely revolutionise the world of work.

“As William Khan pointed out emotions have been ignored by the employee engagement sector and it is really fun working for a tech company that is genuinely different. I was given shares as part of the employee ownership scheme like all staff at The Happiness Index but I wanted to invest my personal money to increase my % ownership of the company I believe in.”


ED AITKEN | Entrepreneur


“I invested in The Happiness Index because I fundamentally believe that society wants to move away from shareholder capitalism to a more socially sustainable form of stakeholder capitalism. Companies like this are at the forefront of that mind shift, showing that employee happiness and profits are intimately linked and practising what they preach along the way.”


What Does This Mean For The Happiness Index?


NOELLE KELLY | Finance Manager at The Happiness Index


“We want to use the funding to speed up the development of our Employee Happiness Platform by growing our team which will in turn help all of our customers on their own employee happiness journeys. It will also allow us to continue to grow our culture and brand which we have worked so hard on already, both internally and within our external community. We want to continue to make a difference in the world and be a force for good, balancing our profit and purpose and not sacrificing one for the other, and the funding will help us to achieve these goals and thrive as we do it. 


“The funding process has been a real learning curve for us as a business. The response we have had is overwhelming and it’s amazing to see such a belief and commitment to The Happiness Index from new investors and encourages us that we are heading in the right direction with our vision of Freedom to be Human. We are all on this journey of growth together now!”


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Recommended reading

Employee Happiness: What You Need To Know

Creating An Employee Engagement AND Happiness Strategy

Why do Workplace Values Matter?

About The Happiness Index


The Happiness Index helps organisations measure the key employee engagement AND happiness drivers to power their people strategy.


Our unique platform offers the products, insights and tools to shine a light on your cultural health and empower management to drive thriving cultures.


Our neuroscience-based pre-built surveys measure the full employee experience - from onboarding to exit to empower and enable organisations to understand their people and create data-led action plans.

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