The process of finding job candidates often involves a lot of tedious manual work for recruiters, such as sending versions of the same email over and over again. It is Tower was created. The platform not only automates tasks such as sending introductory messages, but also brings promising leads from the first-degree connections of the organization’s existing employee base.
Kula today announced that it has raised a seed round of $12 million, co-led by Sequoia Capital India and Square Peg Capital, with participation from return investors Venture Highway and Together Fund.
The new funding comes less than six months after Kula pre-launched and brings its total raised to $15 million ahead of its public launch. It will be used to expand research and development, product and go-to-market teams in the United States, Singapore and India.
Kula co-founders Suman Kumar Dey, Achutanand Ravi and Sattapan M
Before co-founding Kula, CEO Achutanand Ravi worked as a recruiter at technology companies including Stripe, Uber and Freshworks. During that time, he saw marketing and sales teams get increasingly sophisticated technical tools, but the recruiting process still remained more or less the same.
Kula helps fix this by integrating with tools commonly used by recruiters, including LinkedIn, Github, Gmail and the applicant tracking system (ATS), and automating workflows. For example, it can send introductory messages to promising prospects through emails, LinkedIn prompts, and InMails. A feature called Kula’s Circle consolidates all employee networks into one dashboard, helping recruiters understand a potential candidate from the first-degree connections of all their employees. Kula also includes analytics that help recruiters more accurately predict and measure the talent pool.
Kula 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 SMEs and mid-market organizations with fewer than 1,000 employees, which Ravi says are underserved.
Ravi identified Gem.com, HireEz and Beamery as Kula’s closest competitors. But Gem.com only offers automated contacts as a product and doesn’t have a referral workflow feature like Kula’s Circle. HireEZ’s only channel for reaching a candidate is email, but Kula’s platform also automates InMails to LinkedIns, an important source of potential candidates. Meanwhile, Beamery only accounts for the outbound recruiting workflow as a small part of its platform, Ravi said.
In a statement, Square Peg Capital partner Piruze Sabuncu said recruiting 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 significant recruiting experience and distinctive engineering talent – giving them the ability to deeply understand the problem and build a solution that scales with the organizations they serve.”