Recruiting Platform Ashby Secures $30 Million in Funding
June 6, 2024 – Ashby, a recruiting platform that efficiently scales hiring from startup through enterprise, has raised an additional $30 million in equity financing. This round of funding comes with a vote of confidence from existing investors following a 6X growth in revenue. Lachy Groom, who also led Ashby’s seed round led the Series C with participation from Elad Gil, F-Prime, Y Combinator, and existing Ashby customers. To date, the company has raised roughly $70 million. This latest round of financing will enable Ashby to continue its rapid pace of product development and enterprise expansion.
“At its best, fundraising accelerates something that is already going really well. We’re fortunate to have found ourselves in that position and as a result, we’ve decided to pull forward our Series C by a couple of quarters,” said Benjamin Encz, co-founder and CEO of Ashby.
“It’s been amazing to see Ashby’s growth and product velocity in the last few years,” said Mr. Groom, “Despite a tricky market, Ashby has 6x’d the business since the Series B and has garnered a lot of love from customers in a space that historically had really low NPS. In the current environment, more and more talent teams are looking to consolidate tools and ‘do more with less’ and Ashby, which is packed with automation and AI-enabled features, is perfectly positioned to benefit from that trend.”
“It’s the first ATS I’ve ever been impressed with,” said Veronica Salcido, head of global talent at Multiverse. “We were looking for an innovative partner that was looking to build the future of talent acquisition, not one stuck in the way things had been done 10, 20 years ago. And in switching to Ashby All-in-One I got rid of a lot of vendors we no longer needed, so that made me look absolutely brilliant to my finance team.”
Ashby was founded in late 2018 by Mr. Encz and Abhik Pramanik. The company emerged from stealth mode at the time of their Series B announcement in September 2022, and have since then grown to support over 1,300 customers that range from some of the fastest growing startups in the world to some of the most cutting edge enterprises with 18K+ employees.
Investment Funding
Investors are pouring money into recruiting solutions businesses, especially those with a psychology and data science component. Here’s a look at some other recent funding deals secured by these companies from the Hunt Scanlon Media archives:
Nursa, a per diem nursing recruiting platform, recently completed an $80 million series B funding round. The round was led by Drive Capital, a Columbus, OH-based venture capital firm. Joining the round were existing partners Pelion Venture Partners, a Salt Lake City, UT-based venture capital firm, and Kickstart Fund, a Cottonwood Heights, UT-based venture capital firm. Total funding at Salt Lake City-based Nursa is now $100 million. “Recruiting firms — even ones with technology — are severely limited in their ability to find specialized nurses with experience and credentials to fit their patient needs,” said Molly Bonakdarpour, general partner of Drive Capital. “Typically, these groups are limited to their existing networks, require contracts and can’t staff for true per diem, increasing unnecessary costs for providers.”
Candidate.fyi recently secured a $1.3 million pre-seed funding round. The company’s platform offers a candidate portal for candidates to receive information in their journey, pulse surveys to collect feedback from job candidates, the ability for job candidates to book meetings online and create profiles and an upcoming scheduling feature. Founded by brothers, Kyle and Chris Connors, with expertise derived from roles with Google and technical leadership positions, candidate.fyi integrates with existing workflows and over 40 applicant tracking systems to automate candidate preparation, scheduling, communication, and feedback. Some of its clients include Synthesia, Tropic, Yext, Thrive Market, and MariaDB.
San Francisco based Instawork, a platform for connecting businesses with skilled hourly workers, has raised $60 million in a series D funding round led by TCV. The round also included participation from new investors 9Yards Capital and Larry Fitzgerald Jr., as well as existing investors Benchmark, Spark Capital, Craft Ventures, and Greylock. With this new funding, Instawork intends to accelerate investment in its AI-powered mobile app and platform, which connects over 4 million skilled hourly workers with tens of thousands of businesses. “We are excited to partner with TCV and our other new and existing investors to continue our mission of making work more flexible and rewarding for everyone,” said Sumir Meghani, co-founder and CEO of Instawork. “This funding will allow us to accelerate our investment in AI and machine learning, which will help us better match businesses with the skilled workers they need, and help workers find the shifts that fit their schedules and lives.”
HR software start-up Rippling has raised $500 million in a new funding round initially intended to help customers make payroll in the aftermath of Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) collapse. The round, led by technology investor Greenoaks Capital, gave Rippling the same valuation of $11.25 billion it had clinched after its previous capital raise last year, the company said. Rippling announced in a March 17 blog post that it received a $500 million series E funding round. Putting the round together took less than three days and took place after the SVB collapse, according to the post. It also noted that it has moved its banking operations to JPMorgan Chase.
Related: WilsonHCG Secures $120 Million in Funding from 3i Group
Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Executive Editor; Lily Fauver, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
