Today, Novaworks, the AI-native Human Capital Management (HCM) operating system for the enterprise built on the ServiceNow platform, announced its launch in conjunction with $8M in seed funding led by Stalwart Ventures, with strategic participation from ServiceNow Ventures and Bell Ventures. The Company also introduced the first agentic operating system for Total Workforce Management (TWM), designed to enable enterprise organizations to modernize HR.
“Legacy HCM systems were built for a static workforce that no longer exists,” said Kelley Steven-Waiss, co-founder and CEO of Novaworks. “With the shift to agentic AI, there is an opportunity to leverage emerging technology to define a new operating model for organization-s in how they deploy and manage their total workforce, including employees, contractors, and agents.” Steven-Waiss added, “We are confident that our partnerships with these early-stage investors will fuel our go-to-market success.”
Strategic Investment to Support Commercial Enterprise Growth
The $8M investment reflects growing confidence in a new generation of AI-native enterprise platforms designed with AI embedded from the start rather than retrofitted. The capital will support product development, team expansion, and customer growth.
“Novaworks is rethinking that foundation with an AI-native platform designed for the modern workforce,” said David Mann, Executive Managing Director, Stalwart Ventures. “We were excited to lead this investment behind a team with such deep domain expertise and a track record of building and scaling successful platforms. We believe they are uniquely positioned to define total workforce management for the AI era.”
“The future of work will depend on intelligent workflows that connect people, systems, and AI,” said Victor Chang, VP of Ventures at ServiceNow. “Novaworks is building a compelling AI-native operating system on ServiceNow to help organizations manage that complexity, and our investment will support the company as it helps organizations navigate the shift to agentic workforce management.”
“Novaworks brings together experienced leadership, scalable technology, and a clear vision for modernizing total workforce management through AI,” said Martin Cossette, Head of Bell Ventures. “Bell Ventures is pleased to invest in Novaworks, aligned with our objective to support a growing ecosystem of companies harnessing the power of AI for enterprise solutions.”
Leadership with Proven Enterprise and AI Experience
Novaworks is co-founded by Kelley Steven-Waiss and Eswar Vandanapu, two operators who sold Hitch Works, Inc. to ServiceNow and have spent their careers scaling enterprise platforms. They are joined by industry veteran Melanie Lougee as Novaworks’ new Chief Product Officer.
Steven-Waiss, co-founder and CEO, is an award-winning Silicon Valley executive, serial entrepreneur, and public-company board director with more than 30 years of experience driving workforce, technology, and operating-model change at scale. A former CHRO turned tech entrepreneur, she founded Hitch Works, an AI HR technology company acquired by ServiceNow in 2022, then served as Chief Transformation Officer, where she acted as a key evangelist leading large-scale digital and AI transformation initiatives for global marquee customers.
Vandanapu, co-founder and CTO, brings more than two decades of experience building enterprise software platforms at scale. As Senior Director of Development at ServiceNow, he led global engineering teams across IT operations, security operations, and GRC, among the company’s most complex, mission-critical product areas. Before ServiceNow, he served as CTO of Hitch and as CTO of ID Services at Constella Intelligence.
Lougee joins as Chief Product Officer with more than 25 years working in HR technology. Most recently, she was the VP of Vision and Experience at Workday. Prior to that, she led Strategy and Future HR Products at ServiceNow, served as VP of Technology Research at Gartner, and held senior-level product strategy roles at Oracle and PeopleSoft.
Today’s AI Operating System for Total Workforce Management
Novaworks is the AI-native HCM operating system for Total Workforce Management built on the ServiceNow AI platform, designed for organizations often forced into complex enterprise HR systems or stitched-together point solutions. By embedding AI directly into core workflows, the platform helps organizations simplify operations and coordinate the modern workforce more effectively. The founders chose to build on ServiceNow’s trusted and secure enterprise AI platform because of its extensibility, security and governance.
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