Announcing Our $115 Million in Series C Funding: Accelerating Our Vision for Talent Optimization

By SeekOut CEO and Co-Founder Anoop Gupta

Today is a special day for me, both for the news I get to share, and for what it means for our customers and community. I’m pleased to announce SeekOut raised $115 million in Series C funding, which brings our valuation to $1.2 billion in four years. Tiger Global Management led this round, along with additional participation from Founders Circle Capital, Madrona Venture Group, and Mayfield.  

Since we raised our Series B nine months ago, SeekOut has increased ARR by more than 3x and doubled our customer base to more than 1,000, including 6 of the 10 most valuable U.S. companies. G2 has recognized the company as the number one Talent Intelligence Software and as the leader for Enterprise Diversity Recruiting software. In 2021, SeekOut was awarded GeekWire Startup of the year and ranked number two in the B2B category of The Information’s 50 Startups to Watch list. We are truly humbled and grateful to you, our customers and partners, for your confidence and support and guidance for the future. 

With this funding, we’ll continue to invest deeply in our market-leading talent acquisition platform. And, working closely with customers, we will accelerate delivering our vision for Enterprise Talent OptimizationSM, with new solutions in employee retention, internal mobility, and career development.  

This is an exciting – and critical – time to be innovating in the people technology space 

No one involved in the running or building of a company needs me to tell them what a watershed time we’re in. Whether we call it the ‘great resignation’ or ‘great reshuffle,’ we’ve seen a seismic shift in how employees and companies engage with each other over the last two years.  

With so much at stake, only the companies with a focused, strategic approach to hiring, retaining, and growing their talent will survive and thrive. Given the rapid shifts in technology and landscape, companies can go from being leaders to laggards quickly, which is reflected in the urgency I see from the board room to the C-suite to find the right solutions to these challenges.  

Here are some key shifts we are observing in the new world of work:  

• Balance of power shifting to employees: Employees want purpose, flexibility, and the ability to grow within your company. Companies need solutions built for their people, not HR, or employees will be voting with their feet and becoming part of this great reshuffle. The great resignation is a huge challenge, but it also represents a huge opportunity for companies to get ahead by leveraging people-first systems. 

• Accelerating digital transformation changes the competition for key talent. The modern talent pool must go beyond LinkedIn and the usual job sites. Search more widely, dig deeper, and look at internal talent too. Think about skills adjacencies and development to retain the best. 

• Remote and hybrid work will be the norm. We see more and more evidence of work trending in this direction, and you can prepare your systems and teams to excel in the new environment. Optimization solutions can help build the muscle to recruit, retain, and motivate distributed teams.  

• Diversity remains critical to hiring, retention, and building companies people want to work for. People care about working at a company that’s reflective of the world. Building diversity into all elements of your talent strategy should be a sustainable, long-term solution for recruitment and retention.  

To thrive, companies must leave no stone unturned to recruit and retain talent. We believe the great reshuffle can also be opportunity for every enterprise. The largest talent pool in our time is now in free agency.  

Going from “flying blind” to getting ahead with Enterprise Talent Optimization 

Today, many enterprises are flying blind when it comes to building and maintaining their workforces. Enterprises aren’t evolving quickly enough or haven’t had the tools and resources to keep up with jobseekers and employees. The data is locked up in silos of HRIS, ATS, LMS, and other systems within the enterprise. Many important sources of data, where employees do day-to-day work, are not even considered.  

Further, no company is an island. Without the context provided by external data – external available talent, size of talent pools, diversity, open jobs, available skills and skills adjacencies, salary, competition – even good knowledge of internal employees is not sufficient to recruit and retain talent. And data itself is not sufficient, you need talent intelligence and predictive insights, you need recommendations for actions to persevere and prevail. 

Great companies know you don’t make decisions looking in the rear-view mirror. It’s interesting that data is everywhere in the enterprise except where you need it most: informing the decisions about the people you need and the people you have. 

We believe by maximizing the potential of people – both in the pipeline and already in the organization – enterprises will have the talent to realize unprecedented innovation and growth. 

• With this financing round, we’ll be investing deeply in innovation to extend our leadership position in talent acquisition and power new solutions for internal mobility, employee retention, career pathing, and learning and development. 

   

• We call this new solution, Talent360 Platform for Enterprise Talent Optimization. It’s a system that HR teams have been sorely lacking: a data-rich and data-informed way for HR and business leaders to have a comprehensive 360-degree view of internal employees and external talent, with analytics, predictive insights, and actionable recommendations. Leveraging this platform provides a competitive advantage in recruiting, retaining, and developing their talent base. 

• We believe our strengths in talent acquisition naturally extend to Enterprise Talent Optimization. We have the right expertise on our team, a powerful data platform to integrate with and make sense of numerous data sources, and the most in-depth data allowing for smarter insights and impactful, dynamic actions. Most importantly, companies will drive results for their greatest asset: their people. 

• With SeekOut, companies can glimpse their employees’ future success and the possibilities for all their people. 

We’re so fortunate in our community, customers, and team, and delighted for the opportunity to continue growing SeekOut. We believe strongly that companies who amplify their people will deliver outsized results—as well as building a world where we’re all happier and more engaged at work.  

People are at the core of our journey too, and we welcome anyone interested in the future of people technology into this critical conversation. Whether you’d like to see more of what we do, learn how our customers are diversifying and empowering talent, or you’re curious about joining us, please take a look or reach out.  

“It’s an exciting time to be in the people technology space as there’s a clear shift in the way companies are thinking about hiring and retaining talent. SeekOut is at the forefront of this change, delivering a best-in-class solution for talent optimization that enables businesses to hire, grow and retain their workforce like never before. We are excited to partner with them as they continue to reshape the industry and provide companies with data, insights, and actions that drive results.” — John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global Management