Fetcher, a New York-based recruiting platform company that uses artificial intelligence and human expertise to find top talent, announced it raised $5.4 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by Accomplice and Slow Ventures. Existing investors Picus and Revel Partners also participated. And this round also included individual investors such as Paul English (founder of Kayak), Amol Sarva (founder of Knotel) and James Joaquin (co-founder of Obvious Ventures).
Photo: Fetcher
“With our latest round of funding, we were able to hire several outstanding executives and industry luminaries to lead our Sales, Customer Success and Operations teams,” said co-founder and CEO Andres Blank in a statement. “We’re also focused on using our funding to scale our Data Science and Engineering teams to ensure amazing product innovations for our customers.”
Fetcher utilizes artificial intelligence to automate the recruiting process for large and small companies. Currently, there are more than 7 million open jobs in the U.S. and Fetcher’s success rate in recruiting top candidates for these openings have gained attention from a number of prominent companies such as Peloton, Paperless Post, Equinox, AppNexus, Bridgestone, and DigitalOcean.
“At Fetcher, we believe the best people are typically engaged in their work, and you have to proactively recruit them. Top candidates will rarely be found via job boards, in marketplaces, or through your inbound applications,” added Fetcher co-founder Genevieve Wolff Jurvetson. “The challenge is that most companies don’t have the time or domain expertise to effectively find and attract the best people. Fetcher does the heavy lifting so that recruiting teams and hiring managers can focus on what they do best —providing an amazing candidate experience.”
Fetcher’s human-in-the-loop approach complements their AI-powered recruiting — which ensures the highest quality matches for their clients with high efficiency. Using Fetcher, recruiters and hiring managers spend an average of 15 minutes per week to launch dozens of outreach emails and follow up messages to qualified candidates. Normally, this would take about 12 hours per week with traditional recruiting practices.
And to ensure higher response rates, Fetcher has an in-house team that partners with clients to draft compelling outreach messages. Since it syncs with the Gmail or Outlook accounts, they can automate the outreach process including follow-ups. Last year, 27% of Fetcher’s hires occured after the second or third follow-up.
“Thoughtful recruiting requires a level of human expertise that’s not fully replicable by machines today. We believe Fetcher’s unique combination of AI and human intuition is the smartest and fastest way for a company to scale,” explained Slow Ventures partner Sam Lessin.
This year, Fetcher hired a number of executives to help fuel its growth. These hires include Scott Fowle as chief revenue officer (previously chief strategy officer at SmashFly and executive at HireVue and SAP SuccessFactors), Korneel Bouman as chief customer officer (previously head of customer success at Stack Overflow), Dario Salas Machado as VP of Finance (previously Director of Ad Sales Analytics at Univision), and Tara Cooper as VP of Sales and Enablement (previously VP of Sales Enablement at SmashFly).
