Launching Wave1; an On-Demand People Tech Team for Scale-ups

Hawkwood has partnered with Andy Turnbull, former Head of People Services at Bolt, to launch Wave1 as a joint venture. Wave1 is an on-demand People Tech team that helps People functions scale with confidence, implementing and optimising best-in-class HR applications, automation tools, and AI-driven workflows, all underpinned by clean, reliable HR data.

Andy Turnbull co-founded Wave1 following six years at Bolt; the European mobility and delivery platform, where he joined when the company had approximately 1,000 employees and was part of the People Leadership Team that scaled it to over 4,000. Prior to Bolt, Andy spent several years in HR Transformation, delivering Workday implementations for enterprise clients. 

The partnership with Andy and the launch of Wave1 is a natural extension of Hawkwood’s work in recruiting People & Talent hires into Technology companies, as we seek to provide other high-value solutions to our existing clients.

The Problem Wave1 Solves

Most People functions at scaling technology companies are running on a fragmented HR technology stack. Tools have been adopted at different stages of growth, some are integrated with one another well and others less so, systems are often procured in silos with little long-term strategy. The result is a patchwork of systems that creates friction for HR teams and manual processes for people ops and employees.

Employees frequently find themselves logging into multiple different HR platforms to complete basic tasks – checking payslips, requesting leave, accessing policies – when ideally they would do all of it within a tool they already use every day, such as Slack. The technology exists to deliver that experience, but many companies have simply not had the internal capacity or expertise to build it.

These problems compound as companies grow. Organisations regularly outgrow their HR technology stack at precisely the moment when they are least able to manage a migration: when the business is scaling rapidly, headcount is increasing, and internal teams are already stretched. Projects get deprioritised, technical and process debt accumulates, and the gap between what the People function needs and what its technology can deliver continues to widen.

HR leaders are also operating in a vendor landscape that has become genuinely difficult to navigate. New tools emerge constantly, and it is not always clear whether the platforms a company is using are the right ones for its stage, size, or specific use case. Evaluating alternatives, managing a transition, and ensuring integrations hold together in the process requires a type of expertise that most People teams do not have sitting in-house.

Why AI Makes This More Urgent

The emergence of AI-native tools in HR operations creates significant opportunity for People functions – in efficiency, in analytical capability, and in the quality of experience delivered to employees and managers. However, realising that potential depends on a precondition that most organisations have not yet met: clean, accurate, well-structured people data.

AI systems are only as reliable as the data they work with. If an organisation wants to use AI to identify trends in attrition, model workforce scenarios, or automate people operations workflows, the underlying data must be complete, accurate, and consistently structured. In most scaling technology companies, this isn’t the case. Data sits across multiple systems, fields are inconsistently populated, and integration gaps mean that records in one platform do not reflect the current state of another. AI and intelligent workflows deployed on top of that foundation will produce flawed analysis and unreliable automation.

Wave1’s work on data quality, system integration, and stack optimisation is therefore not a prerequisite to AI adoption – it is the enabler of it. Without that foundational layer in place, investment in AI tooling will underdeliver.

Beyond data quality, AI-powered development tools now make it possible to build bespoke, lightweight software to solve specific problems within the People function — tools that would previously have required significant engineering resource to create. This opens up meaningful new possibilities, but also introduces risk, particularly for organisations at significant scale or those that are publicly listed, where the governance requirements around confidential people data are stringent. Andy’s background working with enterprise tools at enterprise scale means Wave1 understands both the opportunity and the guardrails required to pursue it responsibly. In short, the Wave1 team can help separate hype with real opportunity. 

The Opportunity

The convergence of three factors makes this the right moment to launch Wave1.

First, AI is forcing a reassessment of HR technology infrastructure across the market. People leaders who might previously have deferred a tooling decisions or data quality projects are now confronting the reality that their ability to adopt AI depends on getting that foundation right. 

Second, technology companies are under greater pressure than at any point in the last decade to operate lean and demonstrate that their People functions are running efficiently. AI-automated workflows are one of the most direct levers available to achieve that. The business case for investment in People Tech has rarely been stronger.

Third, the right team now exists to deliver it. Andy Turnbull is one of a small number of practitioners who has both the technical implementation experience and the in-house operational experience to advise credibly on these problems. He has sat in the seat of the clients Wave1 serves, and has managed People technology at the scale those clients are moving towards. 

Wave1 Service Lines

Wave1 operates as an on-demand extension of a client’s People team, working in a tech-agnostic way across a defined set of capabilities:

• HRIS optimisation – auditing, configuring, and improving the performance of existing core HR systems, e.g Hibob, Workday, Revolut People and Deel
• Application deployment – implementing new Talent, Recruiting, Analytics and Payroll platforms
• Data quality and integrations – cleaning people data, building integrations between systems, and ensuring data flows correctly across the stack
• Workflow automation – building automated people operations workflows using platforms such as Make and n8n, reducing manual processes and enabling leaner team operation
• Stack evaluation – helping People leaders assess whether their current tools are right for their stage and use case, and managing vendor selection and transition where change is warranted

Wave1 works as a team of builders and operators – not advisors who produce recommendations and step away, but practitioners who roll up their sleeves and deliver alongside the client’s own team.

The Wider Market

The current provider landscape for People Tech work falls into three broad categories, none of which, we believe, fully serves the needs of a scaling technology company.

Individual contractors can bring relevant technical skills but operate alone, limiting bandwidth and the breadth of capability available on any given project. 

Product-aligned consultancies – firms deeply specialising in Workday, SAP, or similar platforms – bring deep expertise in a single tool but are incentivised to recommend and deploy that tool regardless of whether it is the right fit. 

Generalist technology or HR consulting firms have broader reach but lack the depth of HR tech specialism and, critically, the contextual understanding of what it means to operate within a high-growth technology company specifically.

Wave1 occupies a position none of these providers currently hold: a specialist People Tech team with deep implementation expertise, genuine in-house experience at high-growth tech scale-ups, and a tech-agnostic approach that puts the client’s unique needs and circumstances ahead of any single vendor relationship. It may for example, be optimal for a company to self-build solutions rather than adopt tools provided by Wave1 partners, or Wave1 may assist in optimising the client’s current stack of applications without any need for consolidation or migration.

Early Momentum

Wave1 has already delivered its first client engagement – a project completed in stealth for a large multinational FinTech headquartered in Berlin. Having received overwhelmingly positive feedback and, with the public launch now live, Wave1 has new projects pipelined with further multinational technology companies due to commence in the coming weeks.

Who Wave1 Serves

Wave1 is built for two types of client.

The first is a Chief People Officer or VP of People at a technology scale-up who knows that their People Tech infrastructure is not where it needs to be, and who wants a trusted partner to help them assess, plan, and deliver the transformation required. 

Whether the starting point is a fragmented stack, poor data quality, underperforming systems, or a desire to deploy AI into people operations, Wave1 can provide the expertise and hands-on resources to move the work forward.

The second is a People Technology leader who already has a clear vision for what needs to be built or changed, but lacks the internal capacity to deliver it. Wave1 can operate as an on-demand extension of that team – bringing technical depth, implementation experience, and the bandwidth to execute.

Wave1 will be serving companies across Europe and the United States, with the support of a remote team distributed  globally.

To find out more or to start a conversation, visit wave1.co.