Seattle-area startup Included announced Wednesday that it has been acquired by Phenom, a global human resources company based in Pennsylvania. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Included launched five years ago in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the widespread move by companies nationwide to better support racial and ethnic diversity throughout their operations. The startup initially focused its data analytics on DEI-related efforts, but expanded to support employee retention and engagement, faster hiring timelines, and managing performance evaluations.
Raghu Gollamudi, Included’s co-founder and CEO, called the acquisition “a major accelerator for our vision.”
“By integrating Included into Phenom’s Applied AI platform, we’ll bring more Native AI and Agentic AI into people analytics — so teams can move from static dashboards to insights that are timely, actionable, and embedded in how work actually happens,” Gollamudi said on LinkedIn.
Included has less than 15 employees, according to LinkedIn data. In announcing the acquisition, John Deal, Phenom’s senior director of product marketing, said the business would “welcome the Included team and customers to the Phenom family.”
We reached out to Gollamudi for more details about how Included will be integrated into Phenom’s platform.
Gollamudi, who won Startup CEO of the Year at the 2022 GeekWire Awards, previously co-founded privacy tech startup Integris Software, which sold to OneTrust in 2020. Earlier in his career, he was a principal development lead at Microsoft for nine years.
Included co-founder Chandan Golla, the company’s chief product and customer officer, was vice president of products at Integris and worked at eBay for more than a decade.
Co-founder Laura Close, the startup’s chief business development officer, previously worked in career consulting and in support of labor organizations. Close is now CEO of Close Cohen, a job search and executive coaching firm.
Included raised $5.4 million from investors, including a $3.5 million seed round led by Trilogy Equity Partners in 2022. FlyingFish, SignalFire and Ascend participated in both the seed and pre-seed rounds, while Alumni Ventures joined as a new investor in the seed round.
