SeekOut today announced Series A funding of $6 million led by Madrona
Venture Group, with participation from existing investor Mayfield.
As the world becomes increasingly digital, companies in every industry
have an urgent need to find tech talent to thrive. SeekOut offers
companies a competitive edge in hiring tech talent and to support their
diversity goals. Launched in early 2018, the company has quickly gained
ground with more than 75 enterprise customers spanning multiple
industries, including technology, defense, finance, pharma, consumer
packaged goods, food & beverage.
Tech talent is hard to find because developers, engineers, and
scientists don’t bother to keep an updated profile on sites like
LinkedIn. Even worse, these sites provide a very narrow view of a
candidate’s skills and abilities. Recruiters who limit themselves to
traditional talent pools miss out on millions of quality, untapped
candidates. SeekOut significantly expands the talent pool available by
scouring public data and using natural-language (NLP) and
machine-learning (ML) technologies to understand the expertise of each
candidate and build a complete 360-degree view of each potential
employee.
SeekOut’s AI-powered search engine gives recruiters the tools to find
the best fit matches in the talent pool. By automating the candidate
search and understanding past hiring patterns, SeekOut makes every
recruiter a search expert and simplifies the task of zeroing in on the
right candidate.
“As a VC, every day I see the challenges teams face in hiring the best
talent to realize their vision. Among the numerous investments being
made in HR Tech, the SeekOut solution stood out for us as serving a
critical need faced by every company, across industries,” said S.
Somasegar, managing director, Madrona Venture Group. “As every company
goes through the digital transformation, the need for technical talent
is growing leaps and bounds. The SeekOut team deeply understands these
challenges and has the expertise and drive to address them. I’ve been
following the company for several years and am so impressed with their
customer focus, innovative technology, and growth.” As part of the
funding, S. Somasegar will join the SeekOut board.
Leading corporations understand diverse teams drive the greatest
business value. Beyond finding candidates based on specific job
requirements, SeekOut enables corporations to fill their talent funnel
with highly qualified diverse candidates using best-in-class diversity
filters and solutions to reduce unconscious bias.
“At ExtraHop, we believe that the best products, services, and companies
are built by strong teams that include a diversity of backgrounds,
perspectives, ideas, and experiences. To support our diversity hiring
goals, we took an early bet on SeekOut and decided to do a pilot. Within
the first 30 days, SeekOut helped my team source and hire a woman
engineering manager in the extremely competitive Seattle market. It was
a home run and we have now deployed SeekOut across our team,” said Beth
Kester-Warner, Recruiting Manager, ExtraHop.
SeekOut was founded by Anoop Gupta, CEO and former Distinguished
Scientist at Microsoft, and Aravind Bala, CTO and former engineering
leader for Bing search engine. As engineering leaders, both acutely
faced the problem of hiring tech-talent in building their own teams.
“The competition for talent has never been more intense. The companies
who will win know they need to use the most advanced solutions to find
the best candidates. We’re delighted by the feedback we receive from our
customers daily who tell us they find more qualified candidates faster
with SeekOut,” commented Anoop Gupta, co-founder and CEO. “This funding
will help us further develop our solution to help companies find the
best talent to meet their vision and goals.”
“SeekOut has been a highly effective tool for us, especially as we seek
hard-to-find cleared engineering talent in an extremely competitive
market. SeekOut’s customer support team has been delightful and
knowledgeable, always there to lend a helping hand for any difficult
sourcing task,” said Jody Simon, Senior Talent Sourcer, Defense customer.
About Madrona
Madrona has been investing in early-stage technology companies in the
Pacific Northwest for nearly 25 years and has been privileged to play a
role in some of the region’s most successful technology ventures. The
firm invests predominately in seed and Series A rounds across the
information technology spectrum, including cloud infrastructure,
intelligent applications, digital media and advertising, ecommerce and
consumer software. Madrona manages nearly $1.7 billion and was an early
investor in companies such as Amazon.com, Apptio, Smartsheet, Rover.com,
and Redfin. www.madrona.com
About SeekOut
SeekOut empowers companies to go beyond LinkedIn in recruiting
hard-to-find and diverse talent. SeekOut’s comprehensive database of
whole person profiles, intuitive AI search, and personalized messaging
gives companies the ability to find and engage in-demand professionals.
SeekOut is founded by top executives and engineers from Microsoft and is
used today at major enterprises across multiple industries. www.seekout.io
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