Skillenza raises Rs 4.7 Cr in seed round led by Blume Ventures and Indian Angel Network
Bengaluru-based Skillenza, an online hiring and talent management company formerly known as Venturesity, has secured Rs 4.7 crore in a seed round led by Blume Ventures and Indian Angel Network.
Other investors include Aneesh Reddy from Capillary Technologies, Surojit Niyogi from HomeBit, TaxiForSure Founder Raghunandan G, Pallav Nadhani of FusionCharts, and Tracxn.
The platform helps enterprises 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 be proactive.
The funds from this seed round will be utilised to bost skill assessment modules, increase user engagement, and further build expertise in the challenge-centric domain.
The company had raised Rs 1.6 crore in angel funding in 2015.
Subhendu Panigrahi, Co-founder and CEO, 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.”
Subhendu co-founded Skillenza with Prashant Koirala and Rajesh Rai in 2014. It helps enterprises in hiring and talent management host challenges like 30-minute quizzes, programming tasks, case study competitions, and 24-hour hackathons to engage and evaluate talent.
The company counts Ola, Amazon, and IBM among its clients.
At present, the company claims to have 3,50,000 users actively solving challenges posted by enterprises. The rewards include jobs, internships, prizes, bragging rights, and learning. It also claims to have a month-on-month growth rate of 10 percent.
The other use cases for enterprises apart from talent branding and hiring are product evangelism and open innovation.
Speaking about the investment, Karthik Reddy from 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 résumé will become less relevant in the future as companies want more colour on the skills and incoming talents want to boost and showcase their skill sets.”
When it comes to online recruitment, LinkedIn is the leader of the career-oriented social networks. HackerEarth works in similar space and had raised $4 million earlier this year.
