Chilean startup Buk secures precedent-setting $50M in Series A funding round

Chilean HR company Buk announced that it has secured a $50 million investment in a Series A round led by Greenoaks. SoftBank also participated.

A Chilean startup has never received initial backing of this size.

The $50M investment raises Buk’s value to $417M, making it the third most valuable startup in Chile after Cornershop and NotCo.

In 2020 Uber acquired Cornershop, a grocery delivery service, that was valued at the time at $3 billion. On the other hand, plant-based dairy company NotCo’s most recent valuation is $1.5 billion.

Buk is a cloud-based HR platform that enables companies to implement end-to-end mechanisms for performance metrics. Some of this platform’s features include multi-dimensional performance, payroll and recruiting.

In 2017, Jaime Arrieta, Santiago Lira, Teresita Morán, Felipe Sateler and Ricardo Sateler founded Buk in Chile. The startup has grown organically since then, bootstrapping its way to this precedent-setting $50M investment –the company’s first institutional funding.

According to TechCrunch, the investment will accelerate Buk’s growth in Mexico and strengthen its new Colombian and Peruvian markets. It will also prompt acquisitions of new regional ventures that strengthen its product development strategy.