The challenge
Parloa is a fast-moving conversational AI company that has scaled rapidly across teams and geographies. As headcount grew, so did the complexity of managing employment contracts, equity incentive agreements, and legal documentation across an HR function and a lean legal team that had to stay in sync without a shared operational backbone.
Raiko Costa, Lead Global People Operations, had seen what the alternative looked like. At a previous company, equity was managed entirely in Excel spreadsheets until the numbers stopped matching and different people held different versions of the truth. A tool was eventually implemented, but only in the final months before he left. "Finally we had data, finally we could use a platform," he recalls. Contract management, meanwhile, was still handled entirely in Word. At Parloa, he was determined not to repeat that experience.
On the legal side, Carolin Gütschow, Director Legal, Global, faced a familiar early-stage reality: no reliable filing system, no single source of truth, and a growing volume of incentive agreements that needed to be created, tracked, and made accessible to employees. Before GAIA, everything lived in Drive folders. "Whoever was responsible just filed things there. No specific tool in place, no reliable process." With the ESOP program expanding and employment contracts multiplying across geographies, a spreadsheet and a generic e-signature tool were no longer enough.
Parloa evaluated alternatives, including tools that were better known in the market, but found that what they offered was visibility without operational depth. "You can see what you have," Carolin explains, "but you cannot have the operational processes behind it." What ultimately brought Parloa to GAIA was the combination of a close working relationship from the start, genuine responsiveness to their specific needs, and the ability to shape the product alongside a team that understood legal and equity deeply.
How GAIA helped
One source of truth across HR and legal. The most immediate impact was consolidation. For the People Operations team, GAIA connected directly with Greenhouse for candidate data and HiBob for document storage, replacing a manual process where contracts had to be created, signed, and then filed across multiple tools by hand. Parloa had previously used Personio before migrating to HiBob; GAIA supported both systems without disruption, keeping the operational workflow intact through the transition.
"Getting contracts pre-populated the second someone is hired in Greenhouse - that's something I would not want to miss again," says Raiko Costa. "The contract is ready, you run through it, edit the last remaining points, and that's it. Once it's signed, everything is automatically pulled over to HiBob. I don't have to worry about it anymore."
10x faster contract creation. Raiko Costa puts the efficiency gain in concrete terms: in the same time it used to take to produce one contract in Word, he can now issue ten. The driver is a combination of pre-populated templates, guided workflows, and integrations that eliminate manual data entry at every step. For the legal team, the same logic applies to incentive agreements - a process that once required navigating folders, copying information, and managing signatures manually now takes two to three minutes per agreement. "Even a working student can do it," Carolin notes. "You open the template, click through the questions, and that's it."
Equity management and the employee experience. Parloa now manages around 1,000 incentive agreements on GAIA. The platform serves not just the legal and HR teams, but the employees themselves - who access their participation view directly to track vesting, valuations, and equity growth. "It's a huge topic for the younger generation joining our company," Carolin says. "Some of them check on a weekly basis. The graphs, the potential - it makes something complex very easy to understand."
When Parloa ran a tender offer, GAIA supported the creation of the required template from scratch and enabled the bulk send of all participant agreements within one to two days - a process that would have taken the internal team a full week to handle manually. "That's a massive cost and time saver," Carolin says. "Definitely."
A reliable foundation for due diligence and reporting. When investors or lenders request data, Parloa can respond immediately. "GAIA was our main source of truth when we started our reporting - we exported the pools and had the data ready by the required date," Carolin explains. "For the due diligence, all stakeholders could just easily go there. That would not be possible if we were filing things in Drive."
Results
Across both HR and legal, the impact compounds. Contracts that once required multiple manual steps across disconnected tools now flow from offer to signature to filing automatically. Errors from manual data entry have dropped to near zero. And the headcount that would have been needed to manage the volume manually has stayed off the books.
Working with GAIA
Both Raiko Costa and Carolin point to the quality of the working relationship as a defining factor. The day-to-day runs through a shared Slack channel, fast, direct, and consistent even as the GAIA team has grown and account managers have changed.
For Raiko Costa, what sets GAIA apart is the depth behind the responsiveness. "When there is something not working, we always dig in deeper - what is the root cause, why is it happening, and then finding a solution. That is really, really cool. The support team has both the business understanding and the technical knowledge to just get it done. I don't think most tools offer that." Sometimes, he adds, the turnaround defies expectations entirely: "Sometimes before we even finish the sentence, things are already done."
From Carolin's perspective, the relationship has been a genuine partnership from day one - with GAIA adapting to Parloa's needs through rebranding updates, template changes, and contract rewording, consistently turning things around faster than expected. "It's worth it to bring your money to GAIA instead of the large platforms. With them you only get the product, and that's it. No support, no personal relationship, no ability to influence how the product grows."
What they would tell a peer
Carolin's recommendation cuts through the noise of better-known alternatives directly:
For Raiko Costa, the question is simple:
