Online Hiring Startup Skillenza Raises $722K Seed Funding From Blume Ventures, IAN

Bengaluru-based online platform, Skillenza (formerly known as Venturesity), which helps enterprises in hiring talent, has raised $722K in a Seed funding round led by Blume Ventures and Indian Angel Network.

Besides Blume Ventures and IAN, Aneesh Reddy from Capillary, Surojit Niyogi from HomeBit, Raghu from Taxi for Sure, Pallav Nadhani from Fusion Charts and Tracxn also participated in this round of funding.

Skillenza was founded by Prashant Koirala, Rajesh Rai, and Subhendu Panigrahi three years back. It had previously raised $270K in an angel funding round in 2015 from RedBus’ co-founder Phanindra Sama, Jay Sethuram, the partner at California-based Crestlight Venture Partners, Founder and CEO of Torrent Networking Technology Hemant Kanakia, and founder of angel fund and incubator Srijan Capital Ravi Trivedi.

The newly raised funds will be used to disrupt skill building and talent engagement activities.

Speaking about the investment, Karthik Reddy of Blume Ventures says “Skillenza’s product suite to build, assess and retain quality communities for enterprises is a new-age approach to solving the talent crunch and talent retention. Increasingly, the current standard resume will become less relevant in the future as companies want more colour on the skills and incoming talent wants to boost and showcase their skill sets”.

Skillenza empowers enterprises to create a talent community and host an array of challenges, be it a 30-minute quiz, programming challenges, case study competition or 24-hour hackathons to engage and evaluate talent. The platform currently has 350K professionals actively solving these challenges posted by enterprises. Its client base includes leading names such as Ola, Amazon, and IBM.

Companies are using Skillenza to create a community on the platform and host challenges. These challenges help these companies brand themselves, reach out to a broader audience, engage them and filter out the best hire. The other use cases for enterprises apart from talent branding and hiring are product evangelism and open innovation. Skillenza helps companies to build an active pipeline of candidates.

The new modules on the platform help enterprises to engage professionals across skill sets like programming, machine learning, operations, inside sales and product management. The community feature allows businesses to build a pool of talent, which helps them to be proactive.

Subhendu Panigrahi, co-founder, and CEO of Skillenza, said “Our platform is a two-sided marketplace. On one side enterprises and startups are looking to engage professionals and on the other, professionals are looking for the best opportunities. The challenges’ model allows both sides to engage in a meaningful way. We have expanded our focus to empower customers (companies) to hire professionals in other skill sets.”

He further added, “The funds from this seed round will focus on boosting our skill assessment modules, to increase user engagement with highly qualified professionals within our user base and to further build our expertise in the challenge-centric domain.”

HackerEarth is another prominent startup in this space. Earlier this year, the company also raised  $4.5 Mn (INR 30 Cr) in an equity financing round led by US-based DHI Group Inc. HackerEarth helps tech companies hire developers using their platform. Other startups in this segment include Belong, Talview, Babajob, and Aasaanjobs, among others.

Online recruitment activities in the month of July 2017 registered 13% year-on-year growth, according to the Monster Employment Index. Thus, indicating the rising scope for this new breed of enterprise hiring startups in the country. Let’s see how the recent funding and backing of Blume Ventures will help, Skillenza to cash upon this opportunity and strengthen its positioning in the market.

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