Venturesity raises $250K in angel funding, aims to make hiring from hackathons the norm
Venturesity, a challenge and peer learning platform, has raised $250K with the aim of disrupting hiring. The Bengaluru-based two-year-old startup, founded by Prashant Koirala, Rajesh Rai and Subhendu Panigrahi, is using a challenge model to help companies discover relevant talent and hire the right talent.
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The platform allows companies to post challenges to job seekers instead of just job descriptions. Through these challenges, Venturesity aims to mimic real working scenarios and give the job seekers a flavor of what problems they are going to tackle in the workplace. Each challenge has a package of learning resources to go through, 'Leaderboards' to track performance and features to showcase what each candidate has created or worked upon.
Related read: Venturesity uses hackathons to help startups fill quality talent gap
"What we have done is taken the age-old interview, made it more fun, social and rewarding. There are always prizes and goodies apart from real jobs and internships,” says Subhendu Panigrahi, one of the founders of Venturesity.
Venturesity is using this challenge model not just for the tech community but for design, marketing and operations. Their list of clients include enterprises like Oracle, Microsoft and fast growing internet companies like Housing, Ola, PayU, NewsHunt, Hike, MoveinSync and Craftsvilla, and the US-based companies like Perk.
Trends
Subhendu confirmed that while 80-85% of their participants are active job seekers, they are seeing 15-20 % passive job seekers also competing for their challenges. Subhendu added:
The passive candidates are attending to try their hands at these interesting challenges, add the work to their portfolio and win prizes. The companies get access to good talent early on and build a future pipeline. The medium of the challenges are online or offline, which are popularly known as hackathons. We have conducted 40+ challenges so far.
Another interesting trend they found was that the female participation in hackathons is also increasing with many of them even staying overnight to participate in them. Subhendu estimated that about 12-15% of their current participants are women, which is encouraging.
Others in the sector
Hiring is one of the major pain points of both startups and established enterprises. Regular hiring practices which have been part of the industry for a long time are capital and time intensive. Venturesity believes that hackathons are going to be the industry standard to hire talent in the near future.
Other startups that aim to make hiring easier through online challenges and hackathons are HackerEarth, HackerRank, Aasaan jobs, etc. Other noteworthy startups in the hiring space are myNoticePeriod which raised funds from IDG, SprinRole which is backed by Science Inc.
Funding and future plans
They have raised $250K in funding from high-profile angel investors, Phanindra Sama, Jay Sethuram, Hemant Kanakia, Joshua Bornstein, Phanish Puranam and Ravi Trivedi along with other angel investors. Venturesity plans to use the freshly pumped capital to make the technology platform more robust and expand to other geographies and verticals. They are also planning to triple their team size, which currently consists of 20 by the end of the year.
Website: Venturesity