Recruiting platform Kula raises $12M seed funding round to make every employee a recruiter
Delaware, US
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August 31, 2022 09:24 AM Eastern Daylight Time
Kula, a recruitment automation platform, has raised a $12 million seed round to make outbound recruiting seamless for founders and recruiters at SMBs and mid-market companies. The round was co-led by Sequoia Capital India and Square Peg Capital, also saw participation from existing investors – Venture Highway and Together Fund, and a handful of prominent angels.
The seed fundraise comes within six months of the pre-seed announcement, taking the total funding amount to $15M before the public release of the product, displaying a strong tailwind of investor and customer confidence.
“Recruitment is an absolute priority for companies across the spectrum of size, industry, and geography, and is still an underserved business function. Kula’s founding team brings an unmatched combination of substantial recruiting experience and distinguishing engineering talent - giving them the ability to understand the problem deeply and build a solution that scales with the organizations they serve.” Piruze Sabuncu, Partner at Square Peg Capital.
The founding team at Kula comprises co-founders Achuthanand Ravi, ex-Stripe, Uber and Freshworks recruiter, Sathappan, engineer number 3 at Freshworks, and later an engineering leader at Grab, and Suman Kumar Dey, an early member of the Infra team at Freshworks and Grab, and Architect at Salesforce.
The fresh funds will further Kula’s mission with expansion of R&D, product and GTM teams across the three offices in US, Singapore, and India. With a strong momentum of notable alpha customers, the funds will also accelerate its global customer footprint.
"Almost all business functions have reinvented themselves in the past decade, except for recruiting. CEOs openly term recruitment as their competitive priority and yet the recruiters are functioning in 2022 with the tools of the 1990s," said Achuthanand Ravi, Co-founder & CEO at Kula.
"I have been a recruiter all my career at places like Stripe, Uber, and Freshworks. Never have I ever enjoyed writing the same email, a couple dozen times everyday, or updating the candidate spreadsheet based on the replies to those emails or LinkedIn requests. We understand the challenges of a recruiter through first-hand experience. We want to empower them to do their best work, close more candidates, and focus on the future," added Achuthanand.
Kula provides a sleek and intuitive SaaS platform for recruiters and founders to automate continual engagement with their top candidates. It seamlessly integrates with all the tools recruiters interface with in their work day including LinkedIn, GitHub Gmail, and theApplicant Tracking System (ATS).
Recruiters can then create automated workflows to engage with their top of funnel candidates through emails, LinkedIn nudges and InMails. Automating outreach campaigns saves recruiters from spending endless hours on the most repetitive tasks in the hiring process.
"We are seeing a tectonic shift as organizations across the spectrum are switching to outbound hiring processes as default. Achuthanand and team have unique insights in outbound recruitment gathered from their own past experiences and they are leveraging it to build a platform that replaces ad-hoc hiring processes with an automation stack. We are excited to be a part of this journey with a strong team building a SaaS product for global customers." Aakash Kapoor, VP, Sequoia Southeast Asia.
A key recruiting challenge that Kula aims to solve is making referrals proactive. Most referral workflows fail in the real world because recruiters have almost no control over the process apart from nudging employees to find a good-fit candidate from their network. Kula’s Circle changes that. It brings all employee networks to one place. Recruiters can then identify the next superstar hire from first-degree connections of all employees and get an intro with a click of a button. It takes the reactive approach to referrals and makes it proactive - easier for recruiters to take action, eliminating the incessant cycle of follow-ups.
“Our trust in Kula’s idea and team has only gotten stronger by witnessing the product in action. The way companies hire has shifted from inbound to outbound, and Kula brilliantly integrates itself with this new way of hiring and takes the experience a notch above. I foresee Kula being a key component of companies winning the talent war.” Priya Mohan, Partner at Venture Highway.
About Kula
Kula transforms the way recruitment happens today. It empowers recruiters and employees at large to leverage their entire network, reach out, and engage with top talent and turns hiring into a competitive advantage for the company.
Kula is led by a strong team of recruiters, engineers, and marketers. Seasoned recruiter Achuthanand Tanjore Ravi co-founded Kula after witnessing a significant void in the recruitment stack, which was limited only to systems of records (ATS and HRMS) and no system of actions. Previously, Achu has helped hire Stripe’s executive leadership team globally, and in the past, helped build Uber’s tech organization in AMER, EMEA and India, and was the founding recruiter at Freshworks and Practo.
Achuthanand, along with his past colleagues, Sathappan, engineer number 3 at Freshworks, and later an engineering leader at Grab, and Suman Kumar Dey, early member of the Infra team at Freshworks and Grab, and Architect at Salesforce, set out to replace a broken system of recruitment, hacked together with spreadsheets and mass emails, with a scalable hiring platform that saves recruiters from the proverbial recruiting hell.
Contact Details
Kula
Bilal Mahmood
+44 7714 007257
b.mahmood@stockwoodstrategy.com
Company Website
