Olivier Severyns

It was 23:07 on a Tuesday when the text came in. Olivier Severyns was running five restaurants in Paris, and his Wednesday morning opening manager had just called in sick. He pulled up the Excel spreadsheet on his laptop to see who could cover. 

Marie worked a double that same day. Gabriel had requested no morning shifts this week since he had a parent visiting from Marseille. Sophie and Luc couldn’t work together after last week’s argument over closing tasks. Severyns texted down his employee roster, and by midnight he had the shift filled. He woke up the next morning to find someone else pulling out of an afternoon shift. He did it all over again.

Severyns wasn’t a restaurateur by training – he’d founded and sold a tech startup before opening his five Paris restaurants. The restaurant business was meant to be a breath of fresh air, yet the joys of the work were being eclipsed by clunky and manual scheduling woes. 

Severyns then went back to what he tried to take a break from and created a prototype HR software option for half the world’s global workforce: shift workers in the service industry. 

He put this scheduling tool online for free, and dozens of other establishments started using it almost immediately. In 2016, he sold his restaurants and founded Snapshift, later rebranded as Combo.

For three years, he bootstrapped the business as one of the only players in a market he was convincingly validating. In 2019, he raised a seed funding round and grew the team to 70 people. In 2022, he partnered with Highland Europe to raise a $45 million Series A. Today, Combo is 130 employees strong, and serves 15,000 businesses across Europe. 

In July 2024, Combo acquired Arhia, a French payroll software company, and became the only French company offering a complete end-to-end solution for deskless workers.

The waiter taking your order at a Paris bistro likely doesn’t have a company email address. The housekeeper who turned over your hotel room in Cannes doesn’t work at a desk. The bartender mixing drinks at a Madrid nightclub isn’t on Slack. 

For the majority of the 21st century, the office of a service industry worker has been their smartphone, where their schedule arrives via text message. Before that, it was penned on a piece of paper taped to the break room wall. These systems left workers to bargain to get shifts covered and perceive slights from subjective scheduling.

Traditional HR software, however, was designed for people sitting at desks, looking at monitors, managed by HR departments with enterprise budgets. Combo targets customer-facing businesses where employees are in front of customers, not screens: restaurants, hotels, retail, pharmacies, sports facilities, etc. 80 to 90% of Combo’s clients make the move to Combo from Excel, marking their first uptake of a digital scheduling solution.

“Employees don’t want to toggle between applications on their phone,” Severyns notes. “And business owners don’t want a patchwork of different solutions, to have to copy and paste data from one system to another.”

Inefficient scheduling systems are also a compliance risk. French labour law is notoriously complex, as are the regulatory conditions in Spain, Italy, Germany, and every other country. Managers working from spreadsheets often break rules they don’t know exist. “A lot of managers don’t have strong legal training or compliance training,” Severyns explains. “It helps to have an app that guides them through compliance so they don’t do anything touchy.”

Combo builds guardrails directly into scheduling. The system won’t let a manager schedule someone for more than 12 hours. It won’t violate rest period requirements. It flags overtime before it happens. Employees can see exactly which hours have been logged. They can mark their availability in advance, request time off, swap shifts, upload medical documents for sick leave. “You always have visibility on your work time, which has been recorded. At the end of the month, there are no surprises. Everything’s transparent. It helps create a trusting work environment.”

Once an employee profile is initially created in Combo’s system, information organically flows through scheduling, time tracking, payroll, onboarding, and evaluations. No duplicate entries or chasms where data gets lost between systems.

In March 2020, nearly all of Combo’s customers had to shutter their doors overnight – restaurants, hotels, retail shops – all immediately closed amidst the once-in-a-century COVID pandemic. Within a day, Severyns decided to pause all subscriptions, which cut 100% of Combo’s revenue for the foreseeable future.

“We sent a message to all our clients telling them, hey, it’s going to be tough for you guys. We don’t want to be a problem. We don’t want you to worry about us, about your bill. So don’t worry, it’s free. When you reopen, we’ll be stronger, and we’ll come back together.”

For four months, Combo had zero revenue. “It was a strong moment because all the employees felt proud that we were being good partners, siding with our customers. We were all in the same boat.”

Then pharmacies started calling – and grocery stores, and bakeries. The essential businesses that couldn’t close were suddenly in urgent need of better workforce management tools. These were markets Combo hadn’t been serving because restaurants and hotels had been the core pillars of initial growth.

After those four months of zero revenue from their customer base, Combo grew by expanding into new sectors. Looking back at that time, Olivier is proud of the choices he made, and feels the Combo team was rewarded for being high-integrity partners.

In the early days of Combo – when the team was fewer than 20 – Olivier described the culture as simple and rooted in kindness. “We were like a band of brothers and sisters.” 

However, as the company scaled, those values had to mature. Severyns replaced “be nice” with “be transparent.” He noted, “The more information you share, the more you empower people to trust, make the right decisions, and understand what’s going on.”

A company of 20 can run on personal relationships and goodwill. A company of 130 needs systems, clarity, consequences. “We need to have high standards. That has nothing to do with not being nice. Being nice and being accountable, they can live together.”

When Severyns raised his Series A, he had a choice between a large US-based fund and Highland Europe. He chose Highland Europe because of its reputation. “For LPs, it’s a very reputable fund. They have the reputation of picking good companies.”

Combo also selected Highland for their human-centred culture. When speaking about culture, Severyns reflected on a 24-hour retreat for all portfolio CEOs focused on one topic: happiness. “They believe in us, the founders. And if we are successful as human beings, it helps to be successful in business too.” 

Building a company is hard, and scaling through an increasingly unpredictable world is even harder. Having investors who support the teams behind company outcomes creates space to grow sustainably. Highland Europe Partner Jean Tardy-Joubert now sits on the Combo board and has been an essential partner on the journey. 

When Severyns was rebuilding schedules at midnight in his restaurant kitchen, solving his own problem, he never thought he would also solve it for 150,000 workers across 15,000 businesses. He couldn’t have dreamed that cutting his company’s own revenue to zero during a pandemic would open new markets. He didn’t anticipate that choosing the challenge of building in the most regulated market in Europe would prepare him for hurdles in every other market. 

Severyns could have stayed in tech after selling his first startup, or in the restaurant business after building five successful locations in Paris. Instead, he’s building software for the waiter in Paris, the housekeeper in Cannes, the bartender in Madrid, along with the pharmacy technicians and the grocery clerks, because these are essential workers that have historically been undervalued and under-served by technology.