HR Tech Startup DoSelect Raises Seed Funding From 3one4 Capital, Mumbai Angels, And Others

Bengaluru-based HR tech startup DoSelect has raised an undisclosed amount of Seed funding from 3one4 Capital, Mumbai Angels led by Mohit Saxena (co-Founder, InMobi), and Aarin Capital.

Singapore Angel Network along with a cohort of individual investors also participated in the round.

Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, a Mumbai Angel investor stated, “We’re very excited about investing in DoSelect. Hiring great coders is the key to every company’s success in this day and age, where technology is becoming an organisation’s competitive advantage. DoSelect’s cutting edge platform is aiding HR teams understand in granular detail, why they should or should not, hire a particular engineer.”

DoSelect – A Quick Overview

Based in Bengaluru,  DoSelect is the brainchild of ex-InMobi and NIT Jamshedpur graduates – Iliyas Shirol, Rohit Tirkey, and Sanket Saurav. The startup became operational in 2015 as a collaborative and technology-independent hiring tool for companies to hire the right kind of talent. It has a 12-member team boasting of clients such as Amazon India, InMobi, and Atom Technologies.

DoSelect’s SaaS product suite enables companies to measure technical prowess of HR and engineering job applicants. It helps expose them to real-life application scenarios which require them to solve problems for the “code, test, debug, deploy” lifecycle. The startup has initiated many industry firsts such as enabling teams to measure API skills as well as automated UI assessments when recruiting front-end developers.

In August 2016, the founding trio marked their foray into the B2C segment with the launch of ‘DoSelect For Developers’, with an aim to make developers, students, and learners be industry ready. The platform provides existing and budding developers a place to solve interesting problems on over 25 programming languages and domains like APIs, data sciences, machine learning, etc.

As said by Pranav Pai, Founding Partner at 3one4 Capital,

“DoSelect has built a technical assessment platform that helps companies make the best hiring decisions based on real skills and experience. The key components involve ensuring that requirements are structured clearly, that over 50 of the latest frameworks and environments are supported out of the box, and that the candidates are tested with technically-relevant exercises that replicate real-world situations for the open positions. No more multiple-choice questions and tired algorithms on a whiteboard! Candidates will also have better resources to prepare for these technical interviews by utilising this platform before their interviews.

The team has a deep understanding of the needs on both sides of the technical interview and is using their domain expertise to deliver clear, long-term benefits to all the stakeholders by removing the many asymmetries and manual inefficiencies that exist. When replicated at scale, this unleashes a tremendous improvement to the human resource dimension of the tech ecosystem. We are immensely excited to be working with DoSelect in solving this core need.”

It currently competes with platforms like CodeChef and HackerRank. However, as earlier stated by Iliyas, “DoSelect’s platform is inherently different from the competition as we are not only focussed on algorithmic programming problems but on application-based skills. Unlike any other platform, the evaluation engine supports full network and superuser access, making interesting problems like API-based challenges possible.”

Going Forward

The raised funds will be deployed to scale current traction areas through targeted marketing and sales funnels. A part of the investment will also be used for product enhancements that move the needle for HR teams worldwide, vis-a-vis measurement of technical acumen in their respective organisations.

It is further targetting to reach a million developers on DoSelect in the next six months. Also, they are working on a few innovative marketing strategies to reach out to developers in engineering colleges in the country. On the B2B side, they are also working on a few interesting things to make the assessment experience even easier for teams, and support for Android assessments. As Rohit stated,

“DoSelect plans to upgrade it’s assessment gear with Automated Android assessments this year which will be a revolutionary step towards how you test an Android developer. This will help a recruiter analyse the core competencies and proficiency of a mobile developer without much hassle.”

He further added, “We are trying to shift the current technical measurement landscape. 3one4 Capital with its poignant HR insights and a rigorous product + tech world view brings much value to our product roadmap. The added belief of ecosystem experts like Mohit Saxena and Mumbai Angels validates our track.”

Product startups are expected to produce 300K jobs by 2020, with the software market being valued at $146 Bn and growing 12-14% Y-o-Y, as per a Nasscom report. According to an India Mobile Talent 2016 Report, India’s tech boom has increased the demand for developers, especially in the mobile segment. Also, as Indian companies actively adopt machine learning and analytical data discovery solutions, Business Intelligence (BI) software revenue in India is expected to reach $213.8 Mn in 2016, as revealed by Gartner in a recent report.

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