RiseKit, a community recruitment platform, has raised $4.75 million in a funding round led by a range of investors, including Muditā VP, Stand Together Ventures Lab, Sylvie Légère, Steve Sarowitz, Thad Wong, Tom Gimbel, Ryan Daube, Scott Kallick, Verte Opportunity Zone Fund, and Prota Ventures.
With the new funding, the US-based firm plans to build behavioural and skills-based machine learning models that personalize candidates’ job search, helping them find a job and reducing the cost and time of finding the right candidate for employers.
Co-founded by Dario Medina, Dominique Wilson, and Matt Strauss, RiseKit offers a technology-driven resource for companies to source diverse talent that is not necessarily available from traditional job boards. The platform aims to provide marginalized sectors of the community, such as the homeless, refugees, ex-offenders and veterans, with job opportunities and resources to help them overcome barriers to employment.
RiseKit ensures workers from under-resource communities can access a workforce system purpose-built to help them navigate their pathway to achieving financial security. The company does this by providing the toolkits to workforce system stakeholders – government agencies, funders, employment service providers, and employers – to enable them to coordinate their efforts to provide a predictable and impactful end-to-end experience for workers along their employment journey.
Speaking about the company, Co-founder & CEO of RiseKit, Matt Strauss, said:
We must include untapped, under-represented, diverse, and overlooked talent in our workforce to help people overcome poverty. But it’s costly for companies to do that since 100 million people don’t use LinkedIn or Indeed but instead utilize community organizations to gain employment.
Matt further added:
We’ve found that corporations can only partner with five to 50 community organizations, while there are over 200,000 that they can source from in the US.
The HRTech startup wants to create a Workforce Operating System to coordinate efforts, improve the efficacy of employment processes and optimize the feedback loop. By integrating RiseKit’s software with existing ATSs, government agencies, and employment service providers, employers can track candidates throughout the hiring process, a view shared status updates and access in-app messaging. Its vision is to stand for a world where a person’s barriers, zip code, and history do not unfairly define the careers they can create and the life they’re destined to live.
In June 2022, RiseKit raised $1.76 million in a seed round of funding from Steve Sarowtiz, Josh Tolman, Trevor Rees-Jones, Jason Mendelson and Stand Together Ventures Lab.
