Participated · Seed · Jan 2023

Alicia provides personalized, pay-per-use insurance for freelancers that is directly embedded into online platforms. The company is led by CEO Marijn Moerman and is based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Its solution is offered in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and the UK. Alicia raised €7M in Seed funding joined by Volta Ventures, Randstad Innovation Fund and Achmea Innovation Fund. The company intends to use the funds to expand into some European countries in 2023, grow its product portfolio and continue to develop its technology. The financing is intended to support its expansion and continued product and technology development.

Participated · Series D · Mar 2022

HackerRank provides a skills-based recruiting platform that offers coding assessments for employers and practice and interview-preparation tools for developers. The company emphasizes developer training and privacy, allowing developers to control whether they share their practice results. HackerRank says it is a “hardcore recruiting platform,” not an edtech company, and has leaned into remote hiring trends that expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic. It reports 2,800 customers—including portions of the Fortune 100—and 18 million developers on the platform, with roughly 50% of developers in India, 30% in the Americas and 20% in EMEA. HackerRank is based in Mountain View and was conceived by founders Vivek Ravisankar and Hari Karunanidhi while they were in India. The company recently raised funding and reported a valuation of around $500 million according to its CEO. HackerRank operates a skills-based recruiting platform and an online coding challenge community used to evaluate and match developer talent. The company runs HackerRank for Work, which customers including five of the top eight commercial banks, auto manufacturers, retailers and others use to recruit technical staff. Since launching in 2012, the community has grown organically to over 3.4 million developers and the company has about 150 employees. Over the last year HackerRank expanded beyond core programming skills to support roles such as DevOps and database specialists. The company was cash flow-positive for part of 2017 and expects to return to that state in the near future. Management plans to invest in customer acquisition, the community, and machine learning/data science to improve employer–candidate matching and expand the product portfolio. HackerRank operates a hiring platform focused on technical assessments and candidate screening and has launched DbRank, a screening tool for database programmers, business analysts and data scientists. DbRank evaluates candidates by having them run real-time database queries and automatically scoring their performance, initially covering Oracle, IBM DB2, MySQL and MSSQL, with NoSQL support likely to follow. The company received a $7.5M strategic investment from Recruit Holdings’ HR Technology Fund, bringing total funding to $19.9M. Recruit, a major information‑services and HR player with over 28,000 employees and holdings that include Indeed, is expected to help HackerRank expand in the Asia‑Pacific region. Since its Series B last year HackerRank has grown headcount from 40 to 125 and recently hired Scott Gilfoil as head of HR and talent. In the coming months the company plans to expand its India operations beyond its Bangalore office to Mumbai, Delhi and other cities. HackerRank operates a code-challenge community alongside a white-label recruiting platform focused on technical hiring. Its core offerings include sponsored coding challenges and a real-time whiteboard with a built-in code editor for technical phone interviews. The company has doubled its revenue every quarter for the last three quarters, monthly active users are growing 20–25% month-over-month, and about half a million developers are active on the site. Most recent growth has come from the white-label recruiting product rather than its original public challenges. HackerRank plans to grow its sales team rapidly to capitalize on momentum and to expand its product into additional domains such as networking and database administration. Customers using the service include Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, VMware, Skype and Square, and the company has begun making inroads with non-tech firms as well.

Led · Equity · Nov 2019

Validated ID is a Barcelona-based company founded in 2012 that provides digital identity, electronic signature (VIDsigner), and electronic invoicing products. Its VIDsigner SaaS is used by over 100 partners and more than 1,000 clients. The company offers three core products and is developing VIDchain, a Self‑Sovereign Identity (SSI) service targeting the emerging blockchain digital identity market. Validated ID’s solutions are applied in healthcare, public administration, and education to reduce costs from data breaches, operations, IT and support, and to help inhibit fraud and counterfeit products. The company reported steady growth with several funding closures in 2019 and is positioning to expand internationally. Management says recent funding will be used to consolidate growth, extend VIDsigner across Europe and Latin America, and accelerate VIDchain development.

Participated · Series B · Jun 2019

AllyO provides an end-to-end AI recruiting solution that uses conversational AI to automate recruiting workflows and engage candidates via texting on mobile and web. The system aims to reduce lost applicants and improve conversions by delivering a better candidate experience and actionable recruiting insights. It is used by several customers including companies from the Fortune 50, Avis Budget Group, The Cheesecake Factory, Pitney Bowes and Brinker International. Co-founded by Sahil Sahni and Ankit Somani, the company addresses the high cost of recruiting and process inefficiencies. AllyO raised $45M in Series B funding and plans to use the proceeds to expand its recruiting solution globally and grow its AI team. In conjunction with the funding, Jai Das of Sapphire Ventures joined the company’s board. AllyO offers a deeply conversational AI platform that automates end-to-end recruiting workflows by engaging candidates via text, mobile and web. The company targets large enterprises and claims usage by Fortune 500 customers, reporting improvements such as 2–6x increases in applicant capture and conversion and a 91% application completion rate. In Q1 2019 AllyO grew ARR over 50% since year-end 2018 and 4.5x year‑over‑year, added 20% more customers in the quarter, and saw 45% of ARR growth from expansion of existing customers. AllyO reported strong customer experience metrics — 94% of 15 million candidate interactions rated great or excellent and a 97% customer satisfaction score with a 1.5 hour request resolution time. The company scaled headcount to 95 full‑time employees in Q1 2019 and was on track to reach 100 FTEs in Q2 2019, while appointing new leaders in customer success and strategy and operations. AllyO emphasizes economical unit economics, citing a fully loaded customer acquisition cost under 70% of new customer ARR. AllyO is a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based provider of AI recruiting technology. Co-founded by Ankit Somani and Sahil Sahni, the company builds a customizable AI recruiter that uses natural language processing and machine learning to automate and self-optimize the end-to-end recruiting workflow. AllyO emerged from stealth concurrent with announcing a $14m round of funding. The company intends to use the financing to expand AI capabilities, more than double its headcount, further enhance the candidate and hiring team experience, and strengthen the recruiting automation workflow. The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Cervin Ventures, Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund), and Randstad Innovation Fund. Indy Guha, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, is joining AllyO’s board as part of the financing.

Participated · Series A · Mar 2019

Wade & Wendy offers a proprietary recruitment engagement platform powered by natural language processing and machine learning that integrates with existing hiring tools to augment talent teams. The company operates two AI recruiters: Wendy, which sources, screens and recommends talent and automates repetitive hiring tasks; and Wade, which works on behalf of talent to notify them of relevant opportunities. After a series of pilots, Wade & Wendy entered a multi-year contract with Randstad Sourceright to deploy Wendy across a range of Fortune 500 companies, enabling Randstad talent experts to focus on higher-value activities (Randstad is responsible for over 150,000 job placements annually). The company plans to use the newly raised funds for continued development of its solutions. Founded in 2015 and led by CEO Drew Austin, Wade & Wendy is based in New York City. The business recently closed a $7.6M Series A, providing additional capital to scale product development and commercial deployment.