AI-Powered Recruiting Company SeekOut Secures $6 Million

By Noah Long ● May 22, 2019
  • Washington-based company SeekOut helps companies find tech talent
  • SeekOut recently raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Madrona Venture Group

SeekOut, a Washington-based company, offers customers a competitive edge in hiring tech talent and for supporting their diversity goals. Founded in early 2018, the company quickly gained ground with more than 75 enterprise customers spanning multiple industries including technology, defense, finance, pharma, consumer packaged goods, and food and beverage.

Finding tech talent is difficult to find because developers, engineers, and scientists do not keep updated profiles on career sites. And recruiters who limit themselves to traditional talent pools miss out millions of untapped candidates.

SeekOut announced recently that it raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Madrona Venture Group. And Mayfield also participated in this round.

“The competition for talent has never been more intense. The companies who will win know they need to use the most advanced solutions to find the best candidates. We’re delighted by the feedback we receive from our customers daily who tell us they find more qualified candidates faster with SeekOut,” said SeekOut co-founder and CEO Anoop Gupta. “This funding will help us further develop our solution to help companies find the best talent to meet their vision and goals.”

SeekOut is able to expand the talent pool available by scouring public data and using natural-language (NLP) and machine-learning (ML) technologies in order to understand the expertise of each potential candidate and build a complete 360-degree view of each potential employee.

“As a VC, every day I see the challenges teams face in hiring the best talent to realize their vision. Among the numerous investments being made in HR Tech, the SeekOut solution stood out for us as serving a critical need faced by every company, across industries,” added Madrona Venture Group managing director S. Somasegar. “As every company goes through the digital transformation, the need for technical talent is growing leaps and bounds. The SeekOut team deeply understands these challenges and has the expertise and drive to address them. I’ve been following the company for several years and am so impressed with their customer focus, innovative technology, and growth.” As part of the funding, S. Somasegar will join the SeekOut board.

SeekOut also enables corporations to fill their talent funnel with highly qualified diverse candidates Using diversity filters and solutions for reducing unconscious bias.

“At ExtraHop, we believe that the best products, services, and companies are built by strong teams that include a diversity of backgrounds, perspectives, ideas, and experiences. To support our diversity hiring goals, we took an early bet on SeekOut and decided to do a pilot. Within the first 30 days, SeekOut helped my team source and hire a woman engineering manager in the extremely competitive Seattle market. It was a home run and we have now deployed SeekOut across our team,” explained ExtraHop recruiting manager Beth Kester-Warner.

Gupta is a former Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft and he founded SeekOut with former engineering leader for Microsoft’s Bing search engine Aravind Bala (CTO). As they are both engineering leaders, both of them faced problems of hiring tech talent while building their own teams.

“SeekOut has been a highly effective tool for us, especially as we seek hard-to-find cleared engineering talent in an extremely competitive market. SeekOut’s customer support team has been delightful and knowledgeable, always there to lend a helping hand for any difficult sourcing task,” noted Jody Simon — Senior Talent Sourcer (Defense customer).