Pay equity startup, Syndio, appoints new CEO, and closes $5.2 million seed round

Pay equity startup, Syndio, appoints new CEO, and closes $5.2 million seed round

Syndio Solutions, Inc., announces Maria Colacurcio has been named chief executive officer and the closing of a $5.2 million seed round. Syndio which offers an enterprise SaaS solution for addressing fair compensation, empowers organizations to find and fix pay equity issues and stay in compliance over time.

Colacurcio formerly co-founded Smartsheet, a Bellevue, Washington based company that went public last April. At Smartsheet, she served as the vice president of marketing & communications. She is also a former Starbucks Corporation director, who focused on enterprise-wide operations in Finance.

“Fair pay is a crucial workplace issue,” said Colacurcio. “Women and other disadvantaged groups continue to be paid less than comparable men. I’m joining Syndio because I’ve been on the receiving end of pay equity disparities and I want to help employers address these problems for people of every race and gender.”

Syndio raised $5.2 million in a seed round with major investors Sirius Partners, Contour Venture Partners and Frontier Venture Capital.

“Syndio is the first SaaS company to specifically focus on pay equity,” said Brad Beatty, CEO, Sirius Partners. “Companies need a way to ensure they are paying employees fairly, regardless of race or gender. Our firm is very bullish on the economic potential of Syndio, but more than that, its potential to alter fundamentally how companies address the idea of equitable compensation.”

Syndio helps organizations find pay equity issues, fix them with both non-economic and economic adjustments identified by the application, and stay in compliance over time as organizations promote and hire people.

“Syndio makes the analytics accessible and presents dynamically updating results and insights in a way that helps companies pay people fairly,” says Zev Eigen, Syndio founder and chief science officer. “The statistical methods under the hood have been reviewed and validated by agencies, experts, and used to prosecute as well as defend claims.”