Leave management software platform Tilt announced Tuesday a shift in thinking when it comes to managing leaves of absence with its new leave experience management platform, powered by AI.

The move introduces an entirely new category of HR tech: leave experience management, according to the startup, reimagining the approach companies take to administering and managing leaves of absence with more transparency and hands-on control by companies and their HR teams.

“The problem isn’t that HR doesn’t want to be involved in leave at all. The problem is they’ve never had the right tools to be involved in the right way,” said CEO Jen Henderson, who founded Tilt in 2017. “The long held belief was that you had to outsource the entire function, but the real job to be done was to eliminate the administrative burden like complex math, the endless forms, the broken data streams. No one ever wanted to be fully removed from the human connection.”

Leave can be an important strategic and cultural asset for companies when it comes to retention, Henderson added during a demo at the HR Technology conference this week in Las Vegas, NV.

Handling requests, processing, and administering leaves of absence often requires a complicated, multistep, and multi-stakeholder operation that involves a lot of personal information on the part of the employee, and compliance expertise on the part of the employer (or vendor), and lots and lots of paperwork.

Tilt last month completed a $15 million Series B funding round, led by Bramalea Partners, with participation from HearstLab, Firework Ventures, Origin Ventures, and Techstars, bringing its total funding to $37 million.

Henderson said Tilt emerged to better serve businesses looking to do right by employees in the very space “where work and life, quite literally, collide.”

“The most critical, vulnerable moments in an employee’s journey should be handled by the people who know them, who know the names of their family members, know the names of their children, not by a stranger,” she added.

Leave of absence, Henderson suggested, is often outsourced to mitigate compliance risk and maintain efficiency on the complicated processes . However, when employees need to use leave to address something in their personal lives, navigating the “black box” of a vendor’s processes can impact an organization’s employee experience, and doesn’t always free HR teams from headaches.

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