Orgtomic

Dynamic org chart, people directory, and skills map — the employee discovery layer for growing organisations

Most organisations have an HRIS. Almost none use it for anything beyond compliance, payroll, and record-keeping. The data about who people are — their skills, experience, interests, connections, and career trajectories — sits locked in a system that was never designed to help employees find each other, understand the organisation, or unlock their own potential within it. Orgtomic was built to change that.

The hidden gap in HR technology

The HR technology landscape has seen significant investment over the past decade — in payroll systems, compliance platforms, recruitment tools, and upskilling solutions. Workday, BambooHR, and their peers have built sophisticated infrastructure for managing the administrative dimensions of the employment relationship: contracts, compensation, benefits, regulatory compliance, and the data records that underpin them. This is genuinely valuable, and it's where most of the category's capital has flowed.

But there's a function these systems were never designed to serve, and it becomes more conspicuous as organisations grow: the operational visibility layer. When an organisation has 30 people, institutional knowledge distributes naturally through direct relationships. Everyone knows roughly what everyone else does, who to ask for what, and which skills exist where in the team. When that organisation reaches 150 or 300 people — particularly with hybrid or remote work structures — that organic knowledge breaks down. New hires struggle to understand the org. Managers lose sight of available skills across teams. Cross-functional collaboration is inhibited not by unwillingness but by the simple inability to know who to involve. Internal mobility stalls because employees can't see the pathways available to them.

This is the problem that HRIS tools don't solve, because they weren't built for it. They capture structured data about employees in formats optimised for compliance reporting, not human discovery. The result is organisations that have invested significantly in HR infrastructure but still can't answer the most basic operational question: who are our people and what can they do?

The product: visualising the living organisation

Orgtomic's core platform integrates with existing HRIS systems and transforms employee data into a visual, searchable, and dynamically updated canvas. The org chart component isn't a static diagram updated quarterly by HR — it's a live map of the organisation that reflects current reporting lines, team structures, and headcount in real time. For a fast-growing company adding people across multiple locations and functions, the ability to always have an accurate visual of the organisation is operationally meaningful, not decorative.

The people directory extends this beyond hierarchy. Each employee profile becomes a rich, searchable record — combining the structured HRIS data with skills, interests, project history, and experience that makes the individual discoverable by colleagues and managers who need their capabilities. A product manager trying to find an internal expert in a specific technology, or an HR leader trying to understand where skill gaps exist across a business unit, can surface that information directly rather than relying on memory or manual mapping exercises.

The skills analysis layer is the most strategically significant component. By creating a skills and interests matrix across the full organisation, Orgtomic enables the kind of workforce planning that previously required consultants and custom spreadsheets — identifying where critical skills are concentrated, where coverage is thin, how skills distribution correlates with team performance, and what development investments would have the highest organisational impact. For a leadership team trying to understand whether it has the capabilities to execute a strategic plan, that visibility is directly actionable.

Why the remote and hybrid shift made this urgent

The pandemic accelerated a structural shift that had been developing gradually: organisations became more geographically distributed, teams became more dynamic, and the informal channels through which employees traditionally built understanding of their colleagues were disrupted or eliminated. The accidental knowledge you gained by sitting near someone, the visibility you had into other teams' work by overhearing office conversations — these disappeared overnight for many organisations, and for newer employees who joined fully remote, they never existed at all.

This created an acute version of a chronic problem. The need for structured employee discovery — a system that helps people understand who works at their company, what those people are capable of, and how the organisation fits together — shifted from "nice to have" to "operationally necessary" for a significant portion of the knowledge workforce. The HRIS didn't fill that need; communication tools like Slack and Teams partially addressed the discovery problem within teams but created new fragmentation across them. Orgtomic's positioning — as the complementary layer that makes HRIS data visible and actionable at the employee level — was timed correctly for this shift.

The founder: an entrepreneur who has operated in recruitment and HR tech across multiple markets

Ian Turnpenny's background gives Orgtomic the domain depth that software-first approaches to HR tools often lack. He has founded recruitment agencies across three countries and worked with HR technology companies on regional scaling across Asia Pacific — giving him both the employer-side perspective (what organisations actually need from people data) and the technology-side perspective (how to build products that integrate into existing HR workflows without displacing them). That combination is exactly what a product positioned as a complement to existing HRIS infrastructure requires.

The nine months of bootstrapped product development before raising external capital — during which the team signed nearly 20 regional customers — reflects a disciplined approach to validation that aligns with Indelible's capital-efficiency philosophy. The customers were not letter-of-intent signatories or prospective users from a waitlist; they were paying early adopters who engaged with the product during its initial build-out, providing real-world signal about what features mattered and how the product needed to evolve. That's a meaningfully stronger validation than a well-received pitch deck.

Co-founder and CTO Mouhannad Alshamali's product and technical leadership rounds out a founding team that combines recruitment domain expertise with the engineering capability required to build a platform that integrates cleanly with existing HR tech stacks — which is a non-trivial technical challenge, given the fragmentation and varying API quality of HRIS platforms across different vendors and markets.

What would have to be true for this not to work

The most direct competitive risk for the original product thesis is platform incumbency. The major HRIS vendors — Workday, BambooHR, Rippling — have been building org chart and people directory features into their core platforms, reducing the incentive for their customers to adopt a separate tool. Orgtomic's response to this was the depth of the skills mapping and discovery layer — functionality that requires genuine domain investment to do well, and that the compliance-focused HRIS platforms have historically underinvested in. Whether that depth advantage is sufficient to maintain a separate product position as the incumbents continue to expand their feature sets was the honest question going into the investment.

The sales motion for HR tools also tends to be slower than it appears in the initial customer conversations. HR technology decisions involve multiple stakeholders — HR leadership, IT, finance, and often legal — and the category's improvement in recent years has also increased the number of competing products that any procurement committee is evaluating simultaneously. The 20 regional customers achieved during the bootstrapped phase were encouraging, but converting that traction into a scalable acquisition model was the key execution challenge ahead.

We backed Orgtomic because the problem is structurally real, the team had demonstrated domain credibility and early traction before asking for capital, and the positioning as a discovery layer that complements rather than replaces HRIS infrastructure is the right architectural framing for a product entering a market with well-resourced incumbents. The remote and hybrid work shift created the tailwind; Ian's operational background in recruitment and HR tech created the credibility to capitalise on it.