Big data hiring startup Belong raises $10 mn from Sequoia, Matrix Partners

Bangalore-based recruitment solutions startup Belong.co, owned and operated by Belong Technologies India Pvt. Ltd, has raised $10 million (Rs 67 crore) in Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital India.

Existing investor Matrix Partners India also invested in this round, Belong said in a statement.

The company, which raised $5 million in 2015, said that it will invest the fresh capital on product development, marketing and talent acquisition.

As part of the deal, Gautam Mago, managing director at Sequoia Capital India Advisors, has joined Belong's board.

Its board also includes Tarun Davda, managing director at Matrix Partners; and Raju Reddy, founder and former CEO of Sierra Atlantic.

The company's other investors include seed-stage VC fund Blume Ventures, redBus co-founder Phanindra Sama and Raju Reddy.

Belong was founded in 2014 by BITS Pilani alumnus Vijay Sharma and Sudheendra Chilappagari. It offers an outbound hiring Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that helps enterprises hire people through data science and predictive analytics.

Its search and recommendation technology analyses profiles across social, Internet and public sources to help companies discover potential candidates who best fit their culture and skill requirements, while gaining insights into whether the candidates are passively open to new opportunities. It also helps companies start engagement with candidates through personalised interactions, backed by social insights.

"In a world where companies need to respond to market realities quickly, Belong's artificial intelligence-driven outbound approach to helping businesses discover and hire top talent is a step in the right direction," Mago said.

The company claims that, since its Series A fundraise in 2015, it has doubled its number of mid-market and enterprise customers and that the number of offers generated via its platform has risen five-fold.

Its customers include Cisco, Amazon, Tesco, Reliance Jio and ThoughtWorks.

The company has also launched a hiring solution christened Belong Experts, a platform-based solution that connects employers to a verified network of independent talent experts for start-to-finish hiring support.

A number of startups in the recruitment and human resources segment have raised venture capital funds over the past year.

The most recent one is job portal iimjobs.com, which secured $2 million in its Series A round of funding led by early-stage investment firm India Quotient in November 2016. Another recruitment startup DoSelect secured seed funding from TV Mohandas Pai's family fund 3one4 Capital and Mumbai Angels in the same month.

In June last year, Bengaluru-based Zwayam Digital Pvt. Ltd raised seed funding.

Meanwhile, social networking website Facebook Inc also ventured into jobs recently. The California-based company has added a jobs tab on its page, in a move that could potentially challenge the position of professional networking site LinkedIn.