Our First Exit — SmartRecruiters Acquires jobpal
We are proud to announce that jobpal, our second investment in Acadian Ventures Fund I, has been acquired by SmartRecruiters. The acquisition was announced today by Jerome Ternynck, Founder & CEO of SmartRecruiters.
When we invested in jobpal last year, we saw a huge opportunity to automate the candidate experience leveraging machine learning and conversational AI. jobpal was an early pioneer in the recruitment process automation space enabling companies like Airbus, McDonald’s, KPMG, and Deutsche Telekom to drive new innovation in their talent acquisition strategy. Over the last year, I had the pleasure to work closely with the jobpal founders — Luc, Chris, and Andriy. I even got to guide Luc around Las Vegas for the first time while Luc showed me all of the haunts of Berlin.
SmartRecruiters is a company near and dear to my heart and I couldn’t be more excited for the jobpal team. I have known SmartRecruiters before it was known as SmartRecruiters and Jerome was building a modern recruiting platform designed to disrupt and cannibalize his own business at the time, MrTed. Jerome is a thoughtful leader and one of the most progressive visionaries in talent acquisition space. With the addition of Dave Carter (a former colleague from Cornerstone) in 2018, I’ve been extremely impressed to watch them accelerate growth over the last year while many of their competitors have retreated as a result of the pandemic.
This is a unique combination and I’m excited to watch what the jobpal team does to leverage AI throughout the SmartRecruiters platform. For Acadian Ventures, this is an important milestone, marking our first strategic exit since we launched the fund last year. We are excited to now be small part of the SmartRecruiters journey and a big evangelist going forward.
