How Inven's two-person People team keeps up with a doubling headcount using Taito.ai agents

Inven is the AI for M&A: a four-year-old Helsinki startup that helps companies find acquisition targets and company data faster. After a strategic shift over the past year, big deals are landing, headcount has almost doubled to nearly 80, and 28 roles are still open, with even more aggressive growth planned for next year. Aada Kervinen, Inven’s Head of People, runs People ops, recruiting, office and events with a team of two. She wanted an AI-native People ops tool and decided to move from HiBob to Taito.ai so she could connect her people data in a secure way to the workflows she has already built in Claude and Slack.

TL;DR

• Inven: 80 employees (mostly commercial), a Helsinki office plus a small US contractor team, 28 open roles, and headcount almost doubled in a little over a year
• Problem: HiBob covered the basics, but processes stayed mostly manual and sat outside the AI tools the team works in every day. That slowed the team down, and hiring speed became the bottleneck for business growth
• Result: a growing set of agents built simply by describing them in chat, and new-hire profiles created straight from the signed employment contract, freeing up several hours a week for recruiting and people strategy

Growing fast, staying lean: People ops built to scale

Aada Kervinen has been Head of People at Inven for a little over a year. Her remit hasn’t changed much in that time: people ops, recruiting, people matters, plus office and events, the usual startup mix. The company around her has evolved, though. Headcount has almost doubled since she joined, and with it the standards and expectations on the People function. Her aim is a People function that stays lean but can scale with the company, one that never slows growth down and instead helps drive it as a true partner to the business.

Aada Kervinen

Head of People · Inven

Inven is the AI for M&A, helping companies find acquisition targets and company data faster.

People team

Two people, covering people & HR, recruiting, office and events

Headcount

Nearly 80 · mostly commercial, plus product, admin and a small US contractor team

Location

Helsinki, with the US as the fastest-growing market

Growth

28 open roles, more aggressive hiring planned next year

Why Inven moved from HiBob to Taito.ai

When Aada started, employee data lived across Excel, Docs and email. She needed one place for HR master data and leave tracking quickly, and HiBob was a reasonable choice. It did what was needed: data in one place, some onboarding automation, leave tracking, and a working analytics layer. But in the end it felt like a bare-minimum package, and most things were still done by hand.

The gap widened as Inven’s own tooling moved on. As an AI company, the team is used to software that improves at speed, and as connecting tools through MCP became the norm, she needed to rethink. Her other tools already worked together in Claude, but her HRIS couldn’t connect to any of them, so HR tasks still had to be done by hand. Employees felt it too: logging into yet another system just to mark a holiday started to feel clunky.

Taito.ai addressed exactly what I’d been missing in HiBob: the AI-native approach, a chat-based way of working, and being able to bring it into Claude.

Aada Kervinen, Head of People at Inven

Taito.ai’s AI-native approach to People ops spoke directly to that gap. Two things stood out to Aada: agents that connect straight to Claude through an MCP server, and a Slack bot that helps employees self-serve holiday requests and employee questions right inside Slack.

The switch was smooth. Aada’s teammate took the export from HiBob, dropped it into the Taito.ai chat, and the agent created all the records directly, with no manual clicking. The basics were in place within a few days, and Aada soon started rebuilding the automations she had in HiBob as agents, simply by describing them in the chat.

Taito.ai’s agents, built in conversation

The onboarding agent. If there is one agent Aada couldn’t live without, this is it. She drops a signed employment contract into the chat, and Taito.ai takes it from there: it reads the contract, creates the employee profile, saves the contract to it, and kicks off the whole onboarding flow with welcome messages, laptop requests and calendar invites, to name a few things it does. In her old setup, much of this meant manual work and typing details in by hand. Now the agent completes most of it in the background, and Aada simply checks that every task is done.

I’m already building all kinds of agents, and I don’t know if I could manage without them anymore. The onboarding flow has been a time saver, and I couldn’t manage without it.

Aada Kervinen, Head of People at Inven

How she builds. Every agent starts the same way: an idea, then a description in the Taito.ai chat. When her instructions leave gaps, Taito.ai asks clarifying questions instead of making assumptions, so she doesn’t need to have every detail figured out upfront. A new agent appears every one to two weeks, as needs come up.

The rest of the fleet. Probation reminders nudge managers when a new hire hits the two-month mark and put a check-in in the calendar. Birthdays and work anniversaries are covered. And one slightly unexpected favorite: Inven’s weekly office cleaning schedule, where one team is responsible each week. The agent knows which team’s turn it is, keeps up with team changes, and pings them in Slack. Before, Aada had to update the team lists and send the reminders by hand. Now the office stays spotless without her lifting a finger.

Time back goes straight into hiring

Aada is careful with numbers, since it varies week to week, but the picture is clear. In weeks where five or ten people start, creating profiles used to mean clicking through each one by hand; now it takes minutes, even in bulk, saving at least an hour. Small agents add up too: the cleaning schedule reminder never took hours to do, but now it takes no time at all. Many small streams make a big river, she says, and the total time saved is several hours a week.

What she does with that time is the real story. Aada now takes on more recruiting meetings, which speeds up how quickly Inven can bring people in. With hiring speed one of the company’s biggest bottlenecks, that translates directly into growth. The rest goes into people strategy, shaping how the function grows with the company, and into being present for the team, something no agent can do for her.

Taito.ai is the best AI-native people ops tool I have ever seen. It automates our key workflows and saves us a significant amount of time and money compared to our previous tool, HiBob.

Niilo Pirttijärvi, CEO & co-founder at Inven

Performance, and predicting what’s coming next

Aada’s roadmap is already full. Performance rounds are being built into Taito.ai now, and the onboarding process is getting an uplift this fall. She also wants analytics that spot early signals, like unusual sick leave patterns, and a health-score dashboard for the whole organization: a quick overview of how people are doing, with the individual issues worth acting on flagged automatically, almost like a sparring partner for her. The aim is to go from managing the present to predicting what’s coming.

We collect more data all the time, and I want to use it to predict what’s coming: who might not be doing well or may be leaving, and what kind of people thrive here.

Aada Kervinen, Head of People at Inven

Aada chose to get in early, and the switch from her previous system is already paying off. The team is quick to respond, and the product is evolving at a pace she hadn’t seen before. She believes strongly in where Taito.ai is heading, with a clear vision for what AI-native People ops should look like, and she highly recommends it to other fast-growing, AI-native teams.

It doesn’t feel like a traditional HR system, which is great. I can shape it fully around our needs, and as we grow it supports that far better, with no fixed structure to bend to.

Aada Kervinen, Head of People at Inven

See how Taito.ai agents can take the repetitive People ops admin off a lean team’s plate. Start a 14-day free trial of Taito.ai.