Online Talent Platform Assembles $32 Million Funding Round

December 14, 2020 – Turing.com, which describes itself as an automated platform that enables companies to use and manage remote software developers, has assembled $32 million Series B funding. The capitalization round was led by $3.3 billion fund WestBridge Capital. The round includes a number of high-profile investors, including Foundation Capital, which led Turing’s seed round. Altair Capital, Mindset Ventures, Frontier Ventures and Gaingels also participated in the Series B round.

Driven by the massive global shift to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Turing taps into a global pool of developers to help companies hire in markets such as the San Francisco Bay Area and New York, where it has been difficult and expensive to hire and retain software engineers. Turing has accomplished dramatic growth over the past year — growing 17-fold in the last 14 months, from $700,000 to almost $12 million. The company has 180,000 developers signed up on the platform and counts several high-profile Silicon Valley technology companies as customers.

“Turing was able to raise its Series B round in record time,” said Jonathan Siddharth, co-founder and CEO of Turing. “The acceleration in the world’s shift to remote work was a factor. We have seen five years’ worth of transformation in the future of work happen in the last five months. Companies have realized that it doesn’t matter what city your developer happens to live in for software engineering. All that matters is the quality of the developer and having good remote communication and collaboration protocols in place,” he said. “Turing lets you push a button to hire a pre-vetted remote developer, with all the hassle taken away. For technology companies, speed to market is a competitive advantage, and you can miss a critical market window if you don’t have the right talent at the right time. That’s why companies are flocking to Turing.”

“We are excited to partner with WestBridge Capital, which has also backed remote work unicorns and global IT services giants like Cognizant Technology Solutions and Global Logic,” said Mr. Siddharth. “The world is flat. Turing will level the playing field for the world’s best developers. This round accelerates our mission to spread Silicon Valley beyond the Bay Area to the entire planet. If you are a software developer, your opportunity radius should not be 20 miles from where you live. It should be the world.”

“Turing’s rapid growth in successful developer collaborations has given our machine learning efforts a huge data advantage,” said Vijay Krishnan, Turing co-founder and CTO. “We can now train models that predict the probability of a developer succeeding at a specific job to enhance match quality. Data Science also makes our vetting more efficient by optimizing the automated vetting engine for information-gain per unit of time. Facebook and Google built amazing businesses by building deep user profiles. Turing builds deep developer profiles.”

“The IT Services industry is a $1 trillion market with many multi-billion dollar incumbents taking a services-oriented approach,” said Sumir Chadha, managing director at WestBridge Capital. “Turing is reinventing that model with software and data science. Instead of setting up buildings and having developers work inside offices, Turing creates a new category with talent in the cloud—top-tier talent sourced by software, vetted by software, matched by software and managed by software, massively increasing the scalability and efficiency of the business.”

“Turing has a very interesting business model which today is especially relevant,” said Igor Ryabenkiy, managing partner at Altair Capital. “Access to the best talent worldwide and keeping it well-managed and cost-effective make the offering attractive for many corporations. The energy of the founding team provides fast growth for the company, which will be even more accelerated after the B-round.”

“Mindset Ventures is thrilled to be a part of a growing company like Turing,” said Daniel Ibri, managing partner with Mindset Ventures. “Remote work is an unstoppable trend worldwide that just got accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Turing is leading the market, and we are bullish on its ability to grow and thrive”

“Turing is on a mission to democratize access to talent and jobs for the best and brightest, irrespective of geography, background, or network,” said Lorenzo Thione, managing director at Gaingels. “We are excited to be joining Turing’s family of partners and investors and to focus on helping build a more equitable world.”

“Turing solves a major problem for every company in today’s environment, finding enough qualified software engineers to stay competitive and develop new markets,” said Dmitry Alimov, managing partner at Frontier Ventures. “Turing’s approach is a vertically-integrated solution that replaces traditional IT service company offerings with an AI-based platform that is best described as a talent cloud. We see tremendous upside for Turing as more and more companies adopt a remote work model.”

Investment Funding

Here’s a look at some other recent funding deals secured by these companies from the Hunt Scanlon Media archives:

The Mom Project, a talent marketplace, closed a $25 million series B funding round, bringing total funding at the Chicago-based company to $36 million. The Mom Project aims to connect women, including mothers, with employment opportunities. Its platform has amassed more than 275,000 users and more than 2,000 companies, including brands like Apple, Nike, Gap and BP. “Together we’ve proven that hiring, retaining and supporting moms and caregivers isn’t just a nice thing to do — it’s great for business,” said Allison Robinson, founder and CEO. “We’re in a unique moment in time where companies are embracing flexible work and prioritizing inclusion, and are excited to rapidly accelerate our efforts to unlock the potential of moms in the workplace. Our latest round of funding will help expand our Enterprise product suite, build out our mom community engagement strategy and engage with more small business customers.”

Mya Systems, a conversational AI platform for hiring teams, announced that it has secured $18.75 million in Series C funding. The funding was led by Notion Capital with participation from earlier investors, Emergence Capital and Foundation Capital as well as Cisco Investments and Workday Ventures. Over the past year, Mya Systems gained tremendous momentum, seeing three times customer subscription growth in 2019 alone. Mya now supports over 460 brands, six of the eight largest recruiting firm, and 29 of the Fortune 100. Customers include industry leaders such as Hays, Adecco, L’Oreal, Deloitte and Anheuser Busch.

Headstart, a platform that leverages data science to help companies reduce unconscious bias in the hiring process, raised $7 million in funding led by AI-focused Silicon Valley venture capital firm FoundersX, with participation from Founders Factory. Launched in 2017, Headstart is one of a growing number of start-ups promising to help companies increase their diversity during recruitment drives. This is achieved through combining machine learning with myriad data sources to find the best candidates based on specific objective criteria.