California-based Kula, a recruitment automation platform, has raised $12 million in a seed funding round co-led by Sequoia Capital India and Square Peg Capital, with participation from existing investors Venture Highway and Together Fund and a few angel investors.
The funding announcement comes six months after it raised $2.7 million as part of its pre-seed round. Concluding the current raise, the startup has raised around $15 million in funding to date.
Founded in 2021 by Suman Kumar Dey, Achuthanand Ravi, and Sathappan M, Kula says it provides a sleek and intuitive Software as a Service (SaaS) platform for recruiters and founders to automate continual engagement with top candidates.
The recruitment automation platform integrates with all the tools recruiters interface within their workday, including LinkedIn, GitHub, Gmail, and the Applicant Tracking System (ATS). The raised capital will be used to expand its research and development (R&D), product, and go-to-market teams across the U.S., Singapore, and India.
For instance, The platform can send introductory messages to promising leads through emails, LinkedIn nudges, and InMails. Kula’s 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.
“I have been a recruiter all my career at places like Stripe, Uber, and Freshworks. Never have I ever enjoyed writing the same email, a couple of dozen times every day, or updating the candidate spreadsheet based on the replies to those emails or LinkedIn requests,” said Achuthanand Ravi, co-founder & CEO of Kula.
“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 giving them the ability to understand the problem deeply and build a solution that scales with the organizations they serve,” said Piruze Sabuncu, Partner at Square Peg Capital.
The founding team at Kula comprises Achuthanand Ravi (ex-Stripe, Uber and Freshworks recruiter), Sathappan (engineer number 3 at Freshworks, and later an engineering leader at Grab), and Suman Kumar Dey (an early member of the Infra team at Freshworks and Grab, and Architect at Salesforce).
Source @Indianstartupnews
