Kula, a recruitment automation startup, announced that it has raised $12 million in a seed round co-led by Sequoia Capital India and Square Peg Capital.
The round also witnessed participation from existing investors Venture Highwayand Together Fund, and a handful of prominent angels.
According to the company, the fresh funds will be utilized to further its mission beginning with an expansion of research and development, product and go-to-market teams across the US, Singapore, and India. It will also help to accelerate its global customer footprint.
Founded in 2021 by Suman Kumar Dey, Achuthanand Ravi and Sathappan M, Kula provides a sleek and intuitive Software as a Service (SaaS) platform for recruiters and founders to automate continual engagement with top candidates. The platform integrates with all the tools recruiters interface within their workday, including LinkedIn, GitHub, Gmail, and the Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Automating outreach campaigns can save recruiters from spending endless hours on the most repetitive tasks in the hiring process.
Speaking about the company, Co-founder & CEO of Kula, Achuthanand Ravi, said: in a press statement:
“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.”
Kula claims that one of its products ‘Circle’ brings all employee networks to one place, allowing recruiters to identify their next 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.
Commenting on the new fundraising, VP, Sequoia Southeast Asia, Aakash Kapoor, said in a statement:
“We are seeing a tectonic shift as organisations 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.”
The startup is currently pre-revenue with alpha customers, and monetizes by selling to businesses through its go-to-market strategy, which is mostly focused on the United States. In particular, it targets SMBs and mid-market organizations with less than 1,000 employees, which according to Ravi are underserved.
Piruze Sabuncu, Partner, Square Peg Capital, added:
“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.”
The new funding comes within six months of Kula’s pre-seed announcement, bringing its total raised to $15 million before the release of its product.
