HH Ventures, the venture fund of HeadHunter, the leading recruitment vertical in Russia, has acquired a 25% stake in HRTech startup Edstein for an undisclosed amount.
According to a report, Edstein will use the investment to enhance the functionality of its existing assessment and training modules. In addition, the company will work with HeadHunter subsidiary Skillaz to develop what it called a next-generation human capital management (HCM) platform to meet most modern HR needs. Skillaz’s software automates the recruitment process.
Evgeny Obogorov, Founder & CEO of Edstein, said,
HeadHunter is the largest HRTech company in Russia, with a strong management team and a unique portfolio of specialized investments. This investment shows HeadHunter’s trust in Edstein’s product and business strategy, which is also a big responsibility for us. Collaboration opens up new opportunities for us in product development, the improvement of internal processes and customer service. We will increase the functionality of existing training and assessment modules and add new modules within our core competency of automating training in large companies.
According to Edstein, its learning management system (LMS) solution is used by more than 140,000 employees at companies such as VK, Qiwi, Leroy Merlin, Tele2, and Technodom.
Nikita Bugrov, Head of Innovation at HeadHunter, said,
We highly appreciate the experience of founder Evgeny Obogorov in creating and distributing an LMS, as well as the company’s success over the past year. The Edstein team is building an excellent product that can solve the most complex tasks in the corporate training process. With investments from HH Ventures and integration with Skillaz’s HCM, Edstein is taking the product to a new, higher level in terms of development and application. The markets for LMS and HCM services are complex — they have their leaders, whose solutions are widely known and familiar to customers. However, we believe that in these markets, there is the potential to both increase the penetration of digital products and to replace legacy solutions with more modern ones.
Skillaz Founder and CEO Andrey Krylov added,
We are pleased to welcome Edstein to the HeadHunter HR ecosystem. In cooperation with colleagues, we plan to continue the development of Skillaz’s HCM as a next-generation system. We have developed a special philosophy for our service. It is based on a digital user experience that takes into account modern habits — searching for information using Google Strings or widgets with a shopping list and plans for the week, for example. The collaboration of Skillaz and Edstein will create a system with many specialized, rapidly deployable HR modules. All this allows us to provide our customers not with monolithic and outdated solutions but with modern and flexible services.
HeadHunter is one of the largest job and employee search sites in the world. It creates cutting-edge technologies on all available platforms so employers can quickly find the right employee and job seekers find the right job. The company claims its site processes up to 3000 requests per second and more than half a million vacancies appear on the site every month.
