When Workplace Tech Truly Connects: Refresh, a SHRM-Backed Startup, Is Delivering Digital Equity Across HR Tools to Nonprofits, Municipalities, and More

Organizations are drowning in tools and resources, and their employees are realizing less value from those benefits than ever before, creating a fundamental barrier to culture-driven organizational experience and employee dignity. Meanwhile, HR managers are left unable to engage their teams wholly, given barriers such as compliance requirements in connecting with both covered and uncovered employees.

Add to this that most HR technology just wasn’t designed for deskless workers. The portals, dashboards, and communication tools that knowledge workers interact with every day require time, a computer, and, most importantly, focus. But between 70% and 80% of the world’s employees — including cashiers, home health aides, warehouse staff, and restaurant servers — cannot easily engage with these tools. For the janitor, retail associate, or hospital nurse, the current digital stack is not just fragmented; it is effectively invisible. Maybe benefits info falls through the cracks. Maybe training materials are sitting in a portal nobody logs in to. Maybe important messages aren’t reaching the people. All the while, HR teams are largely in the dark and have limited ability to automate and track what's going on globally, let alone within their own organizations.

A two-tier system quietly develops: Desk workers have single, connected digital experiences. Everyone else has a collection of siloed tools, if anything at all.

That gap led SHRM Labs to invest in Refresh, a platform that consolidates an organization's existing HR tools into a single mobile app customized to each workforce. Since that initial investment, the effort has grown into something much larger: a grant program in collaboration with Goodwill, called the Refresh Equity Access & Community Hub (REACH), that provides cost-free licenses to their technology for qualifying nonprofits across the U.S., to service both their employees and the communities they serve.

Why SHRM Labs Invested in Refresh

What was missing in the market wasn’t another point solution or extended walled garden HRIS. Rather, it was missing a unified "Operating System for Engagement (OSE)" that could become core infrastructure to connect every existing silo — aggregating every tool an organization already utilizes and transforming them into a single experience that's predictive, prescriptive, and designed to multiply the efforts of the HR team. What they needed was a system that could function as an HR manager in each employee's pocket.

That’s why SHRM Labs invested in Refresh, a platform that takes those disparate HR tools and unifies them into a single mobile application customized to each organization. Refresh flips the script on the traditional digital environments ("Pull" worlds), where users must know exactly what they want, where to find it, and how to use it. Refresh is a "Push" experience — a "Cognitive Layer" of the modern organization that anticipates need and eliminates complexity by creating unified, agentic journeys across systems. By using over 3,000 integrations to "know" what is happening in other systems, Refresh guides users through personalized journeys before they even realize they have a need, and without requiring them to know what systems or processes they are touching. According to Refresh data, this results in a 90% reduction in manual effort by HR via automating HR co-pilot tasks (distribution, education, and communications) and a 285% increase in benefits usage due to gamifying and surfacing undervalued resources such as school reimbursement and financial wellness.

Refresh was chosen as 1 of 3 startups for the SHRM Labs 2025 WorkplaceTech Accelerator out of more than 500 applications. The 12-week accelerator provides a $200,000 equity investment, an advisory board, and access to SHRM’s more than 340,000 HR Professional Members.

“Refresh stood out because it addresses a problem we see across the HR landscape: the tools and resources organizations invest in aren't reaching the people who need them most," said Hadeel Al-Tashi, head of SHRM Labs.

How the Accelerator Helped Refresh Find Its Voice

Before joining the accelerator, Refresh focused on features and integrations; the accelerator helped the platform sharpen its message and highlight outcomes.

"People care less about how the soup's made and more about how the soup tastes," said Logan Sugarman, founder and CEO of Refresh.

The accelerator helped the team think more about the goals and concerns of HR buyers, what motivates them, and what their pain points are, versus the pure function of what they deliver. That shift toward impact over function influenced not just how Refresh sold but also what it decided to build. It also opened a door the team hadn't originally planned to walk through.

Enterprise Tools on a Nonprofit Budget

The problem Refresh was solving for enterprises also applied to nonprofits, and more acutely. A 2023 nationwide survey of more than 1,600 organizations by the National Council of Nonprofits found that 75% could not fill job openings, with salary competition (72%) and budget constraints (66%) topping the list of barriers. The Center for Effective Philanthropy reported that 95% of nonprofit leaders cited staff burnout as a concern in 2024, with three-quarters saying it already affected their ability to carry out their mission.

But the divide goes beyond cost. At most nonprofits, a person’s services are connected to a status: employee, volunteer, or client. When that status changes due to termination, completion, or a job switch, those services either diminish or vanish. The resources are out there; they’re just too costly, too disjointed, and too contingent. REACH was developed to solve all three problems.

REACH is a national grant program that provides free, full-platform licenses to qualifying nonprofits. Not a stripped-down version. The same platform that enterprise clients pay per user per month to access, including the full set of modules for benefits discovery, communications, learning, wellness, and recognition.

"Charitable organizations face all the same challenges that large corporations do," Sugarman said. "They have too many benefits, resources, and tools for their employees. They go underutilized, and the value they bring into the world is underappreciated."

The sustainability model is straightforward: For every license purchased by a corporate or insurance client, Refresh gives away a license to a qualifying nonprofit. As the commercial side of the business grows, so does the program's reach.

REACH in Action: The Goodwill Deployment

Goodwill was REACH's first deployment. The organization's workforce includes people entering the labor force for the first time, workers with learning disabilities, and employees with limited access to formal education — populations that Sugarman says stand to benefit most from simplified access to workplace resources.

Before Refresh, Goodwill's HR staff faced the same fragmentation as most nonprofits: separate systems for payroll, benefits, scheduling, and training. This was compounded by the complexity in their employee base, which consisted of covered employees, part-time employees, seasonal workers, etc., none of whom were on a single system. Sugarman estimates that 80% to 90% of workers now access resources through a single app post-rollout. That means fewer systems for HR staff to manage and, critically, less time spent answering the same questions on where to find benefits and how to use them. A 2021 HealthJoy survey found that HR professionals spend an average of nine hours per week fielding employee benefits questions alone, with some reporting upwards of 20 hours. When workers can find what they need without submitting a ticket or emailing HR, that time goes back to direct service.

And for people who are making $15-$18 per hour, it's a big deal to simplify how they access benefits. "If we can help them realize two, three, four hundred dollars of value from their benefits each month, that's massive for someone earning $15 to $18 an hour,” Sugarman said.

The platform also offers Goodwill the ability to extend itself outside of HR. By integrating through the same interface, Goodwill can provide community resources such as financial aid, medical care, and job training that employees may not be aware of. Rather than directing employees to another website, these resources are available in the same interface as their benefits and schedules.

"Organizations often want to do more for their people — like offering telemedicine to families — but they hesitate because they lack the infrastructure to deliver it well," said Adrian Gessen, SVP of organizational development at Goodwill. "Refresh provides that stewardship confidence. It's a shift from simply offering a list of benefits to actually delivering curated support that's easier to access and sustain."

An Accelerator Cohort That Became a Product Ecosystem

Beyond REACH, one of the accelerator's unplanned outcomes was what happened between the 2025 cohort companies. All three startups in the class — Refresh, Bites, and TransCrypts — have signed contracts and integrated into each other's platforms.

In practice, the three pieces fit together as a stack. Refresh provides the consolidated front door: one app, one login. Bites, a microlearning platform that delivers short-form training through SMS and WhatsApp, transforms the static compliance content that most front-line workers tune out into something they actually engage with. And TransCrypts gives hourly workers something most have never had: a portable, blockchain-verified record of their employment and training that follows them to their next job.

Sugarman said the fit was apparent almost immediately: "These three things together are a product: front end, middle, and back end." The three companies are now partners, and Sugarman noted that Bites and TransCrypts can benefit from the REACH program as well.

Where REACH Goes from Here

Refresh plans to double the number of REACH grantees this year, expanding into social services, workforce development, community health, and public service organizations. The commercial engine, driven by corporate and insurance clients, continues to fund the program as both sides of the business grow.

Early conversations include organizations serving active military, reservists, and first responders — populations with strong institutional resources that still face access gaps similar to those in the nonprofit sector.

The broader pattern here is worth watching. Nonprofits employ millions of people in the United States, many in roles that demand the most and pay the least. When the same workplace tools that desk-based employees take for granted remain locked behind enterprise pricing, the digital divide might show up at work. REACH suggests that it doesn't have to stay that way and that closing the gap might start with making support less conditional and more permanent.