Novaworks Secures $8M to Reinvent Enterprise Workforce Management with Agentic AI

Key Takeaways

1. $8 million seed round closed in March 2026, led by Stalwart Ventures (a $61M fund), with strategic co-investment from ServiceNow Ventures and Bell Ventures
2. Novaworks is the first AI-native agentic operating system for Total Workforce Management (TWM), built directly on ServiceNow’s enterprise AI platform covering employees, contractors, and AI agents in one unified system
3. The company was co-founded by Kelley Steven-Waiss and Eswar Vandanapu, both veterans of Hitch Works, an AI HR startup acquired by ServiceNow in 2022; joined by CPO Melanie Lougee, formerly VP of Vision and Experience at Workday
4. Funds will be deployed across three core growth pillars: product development, team expansion, and enterprise customer acquisition

Quick Recap

Silicon Valley’s enterprise HR tech scene just got a jolt. On March 23, 2026, Novaworks officially launched out of stealth and announced an $8 million seed round led by Stalwart Ventures, with participation from ServiceNow Ventures and Bell Ventures. The announcement was made via a PR Newswire press release and amplified across social channels, including a tweet from @TheSaaSNews confirming the news is live and verifiable in real time.

An Agentic OS for the Modern Workforce

Novaworks is not just another HR SaaS add-on it is positioning itself as an entirely new operating layer for the enterprise. Built directly on ServiceNow’s trusted and secure AI platform, Novaworks introduces what it calls the first agentic operating system for Total Workforce Management, embedding AI directly into core HR workflows rather than retrofitting intelligence on top of legacy architecture.

The platform addresses a growing crisis in enterprise workforce management: most legacy HCM systems were architected for a static, human-only workforce that no longer exists. Today’s organizations operate with a blend of full-time employees, contractors, freelancers, and increasingly, AI agents and managing that hybrid complexity requires an OS-level rethinking of HR infrastructure.​

Key Platform Capabilities Include

• Unified management of employees, contractors, and AI agents in one interface
• AI-embedded intelligent workflows built on ServiceNow’s extensible, governance-ready platform
• End-to-end orchestration across HR, talent, and operational data streams

The co-founders bring credibility that is hard to manufacture: Kelley Steven-Waiss, CEO, is a former CHRO turned serial entrepreneur who sold Hitch Works to ServiceNow in 2022 and then served as that company’s Chief Transformation Officer. Eswar Vandanapu, CTO, spent two decades at ServiceNow leading engineering for IT operations, security operations, and GRC. Melanie Lougee, CPO, brings 25+ years in HR tech from Workday, Gartner, Oracle, and PeopleSoft.

Stalwart Ventures, the lead investor formerly known as RevRoad Capital manages a $61 million debut fund focused on high-growth Seed and Series A technology startups in SaaS, AI, and fintech. ServiceNow Ventures’ participation is particularly notable: they are both the underlying platform and a financial stakeholder, a structural alignment that gives Novaworks a built-in distribution and ecosystem advantage.

Why Now? The Rise of the Agentic Workforce

The timing of Novaworks’ launch is no accident. Enterprise HR is facing a once-in-a-generation architectural inflection point, driven by three converging forces.

First, legacy HCM incumbents are scrambling to retrofit AI. Workday’s AI pivot forced SAP SuccessFactors to amplify predictive analytics, Oracle HCM to prioritize cloud integration, and ADP to leverage data pools for hyper-personalization but these are fundamentally add-on strategies bolted onto pre-AI architectures. The market is wide open for a greenfield, AI-native entrant.

Second, agentic AI is mainstreaming. The shift from passive AI tools to autonomous AI agents capable of completing complex multi-step tasks is transforming every enterprise function and HR is no exception. Managing a workforce that now includes AI agents as “workers” requires fundamentally new tooling.

Third, ServiceNow’s platform momentum is creating a gravitational pull. With ServiceNow named Innovation Partner of the Year by Phenom in early 2026 and actively co-investing in ecosystem startups like Novaworks, the platform is fast becoming the enterprise backbone for AI-orchestrated workflows. Building natively on that infrastructure means Novaworks can inherit trust, security, and enterprise reach from day one.

The HCM software market is fiercely competitive, dominated by entrenched players like Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, and Oracle PeopleSoft but the emerging AI-native challenger category is wide open. Phenom, a well-funded applied AI platform for talent management, recently acquired Included AI in January 2026 to bolster its agentic people analytics capabilities and acquired Be Applied in February 2026 to power skills-first hiring at enterprise scale, signaling the rapid M&A consolidation underway in the space.

Competitive Landscape

Comparable AI-Native HCM Challengers
The two most directly comparable emerging challengers to Novaworks in the AI-native, agentic workforce management space are Phenom (applied AI for the full talent lifecycle) and Eightfold AI (Talent Intelligence Platform, backed by SoftBank Vision Fund 2).

Strategic Analysis

Novaworks holds a structural moat in one critical dimension: it is the only platform built from the ground up to manage AI agents as first-class workforce members not just humans giving it a unique edge as enterprises begin formally classifying AI agents within their org charts. Phenom, meanwhile, leads decisively on proven enterprise scale and AI hiring intelligence, having automated 40% of screening and saved recruiters 20% of their time weekly at major organizations metrics that Novaworks, fresh out of stealth, cannot yet match.

Bayelsa Watch Takeaway

I’ll be direct: this deal is quietly one of the most interesting enterprise AI seed rounds of early 2026, and I think most of the mainstream tech press is sleeping on it.

In my experience covering AI SaaS deals, the most durable companies are rarely the ones with the largest raises  they are the ones where the team, the platform bet, and the timing converge at once. Novaworks ticks all three. Kelley Steven-Waiss is not a first-time founder taking a shot in the dark; she literally built and sold the predecessor company to ServiceNow, then ran transformation at ServiceNow, and is now building the next layer on top of that same platform. That is a very rare founder-market-platform alignment.

I also think the concept of managing AI agents as workforce members not just tools is going to be one of the defining enterprise themes of 2026 and 2027. Most HCM vendors are still treating AI as a feature add-on to their existing human-resource workflows. Novaworks is saying: no, AI agents need their own onboarding, task assignment, performance tracking, and governance rails, just like any other worker. That reframe is bullish for a company staking this specific claim early.

The $8M round is modest by today’s AI standards but strategically, having ServiceNow Ventures on the cap table is worth more than the dollar amount. It signals platform-level endorsement and a likely path to distribution via ServiceNow’s existing enterprise customer base. I generally prefer bets where distribution is partially de-risked from day one, and Novaworks appears to have done exactly that