Job ad-tech startup Joveo raises $5 mn from Nexus, makes first acquisition

Hyderabad- and San Francisco-based Joveo, Inc., a job advertising technology platform, has raised $5 million (Rs 32 crore) in a Series A funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners, a company statement said.

Joveo has also acquired New York-based Ripple Media Inc., a programmatic media buyer, which partners with agencies to provide an open publisher marketplace and trading expertise, the statement added.

The firm will use the fresh funds to accelerate its product offerings, expand partnerships and scale its artificial intelligence and deep learning layers.

Joveo provides programmatic job advertising solutions for recruitment agencies, recruitment process outsourcing providers, and job boards. Its solution includes an integrated campaign management and analytics tool, which helps companies diversify their media mix and create actionable insights about what sites, which ads and placements are working. Firms can save money by monitoring and stopping bot traffic, and can avoid overpaying for quality job ads.

“Our vision is to build the most democratic online job marketplace by enhancing the reach and targeting of job boards and agencies alike,” said Kshitij Jain, chief executive and founder, Joveo Inc. “Unlike others in the industry, we are a pure-play technology which does not compete with agencies or job boards. With the backing of Nexus Venture Partners, we are poised to significantly increase our reach and create the first AI-based job advertising platform,” he added.

Joveo was founded by Jain in 2016, a veteran in the recruitment business. He was a senior executive at recruitment and job posts platform Monster. In 2012, he co-founded mobile enterprise application firm MoBolt along with another Monster executive, Scott Garrett. MoBolt was later acquired by job-search firm Indeed.com. Recently, Joveo added Abhinav Gupta, co-founder and chief technology officer of ad-tech firm Rocket Fuel, to its advisory group.

Joveo claims to have 10 Fortune 500 companies using its offering.

“We strongly believe that their (Joveo’s) next-generation programmatic recruitment platform and integrated apply/click optimisation technology will allow the talent management function at enterprises, RPOs, job boards and recruitment agencies to radically improve their hiring efficiency at substantially lower cost-per-hire while accessing a much larger candidate pool outside the current job-board ecosystem,” Sameer Brij Verma, managing director, Nexus Venture Partners, said.