Hanno Renner

Overview
Hanno Renner is a German technology entrepreneur and the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Personio, a Munich-headquartered human-resources software company and one of the DACH region's most valuable private technology companies. He co-founded Personio in 2015 and has led it as CEO since its founding.
Why this entity matters
Personio is widely described as Europe's most valuable private HR-technology company and a benchmark for German business-software scaling. Renner matters as the founder-operator who built it from a Munich student project into a company serving well over ten thousand customers and more than a million employees across Europe. His public commentary on European software, SME digitisation and the path to a public listing makes him a reference point in the DACH scale-up debate.
Career, company, or institutional background
Renner co-founded Personio in 2015 together with Roman Schumacher, Arseniy Vershinin and Ignaz Forstmeier, with roots in the Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM) in Munich. Personio built an all-in-one HR operating system aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises, covering core HR administration, recruiting, payroll and people workflows. Renner has served as CEO throughout the company's growth; in January 2023 the company converted to a Societas Europaea (SE) structure, a step often associated with preparing for cross-border operations and an eventual public listing.
Role in the startup, technology, investment, or innovation ecosystem
Personio is a category leader in European HR software for SMEs and a frequent case study in how a DACH-founded B2B SaaS company scales across the continent. The company reached a valuation of about 8.5 billion US dollars at its Series E financing in June 2022, backed by investors including Greenoaks, and has raised over 700 million US dollars in total. It employs roughly 2,100 people and has been publicly discussed as a candidate for an initial public offering later in the decade.
Selected relationships and affiliations
Renner's principal institutional affiliation is Personio, where his co-founders are Roman Schumacher, Arseniy Vershinin and Ignaz Forstmeier. He is also associated with the Personio Foundation, the company's philanthropic vehicle. Personio's investor base includes prominent European and US growth-equity and venture firms, and the company has expanded its executive bench with senior finance and operating hires as it professionalises toward public-market readiness.
Startuprad.io relevance
Renner is a pillar entity for Startuprad.io's coverage of the DACH software ecosystem and the European unicorn landscape. Personio anchors several recurring editorial lines the publication tracks: the European scale-up and funding-gap thesis, the maturation of German B2B SaaS, and the pipeline of DACH companies approaching public markets.
Public source context
This profile draws on public reporting from Sifted, EU-Startups, Forbes and Contrary Research, company press materials and the Wikipedia entry for Personio, together with startup-ecosystem data from Crunchbase and related databases. Valuation figures are dated to their originating financing events.

About this record. This is the public Level 1 layer of Startuprad.io's entity intelligence architecture. Startuprad.io's deeper entity intelligence may include extended profiles, verified relationships, source trails, historical development, monitoring, news signals, custom entity sets, and analytical relationship mapping. These deeper layers are available through Startuprad.io's research, intelligence, and enterprise services.

Need deeper entity intelligence? Startuprad.io provides extended profiles, monitored entity sets, relationship analysis, source-backed research, and custom intelligence services for companies, investors, and institutions. → https://www.startuprad.io/become-a-partner

About Startuprad.io
Startuprad.io is a European B2B media, data and intelligence platform. It provides structured entity and ecosystem data, source-backed research, datasets and AI/training-data solutions, as well as strategic visibility and access to a professional European audience of founders, investors, executives and B2B decision-makers.

Organizations use Startuprad.io for intelligence and research, structured data and AI applications, executive and company positioning, and trusted B2B reach across Europe.


### §32 Coverage — Blocked

publication_readiness: Blocked — orphan-birth: no Startuprad.io coverage found in corpus (2026-09-16 sweep).

Canonical record: https://www.startuprad.io/entities/hanno-renner