By Chloe Breider and Jules Maltz
IVP is excited to announce our Series C investment in Eightfold.ai, a Talent Intelligence Platform that solves employment by simplifying and improving the hiring process while removing bias to find and retain the best talent. Founded on the mission of empowering organizations to transform how they hire, train, and retain a diverse workforce, Eightfold uses AI-technology to identify the best talent both inside and outside an organization. We are excited to invest in Eightfold for the following reasons:
Exceptional Team:
The ambitious vision for Eightfold comes from its CEO, Ashutosh Garg, the former CTO of Bloomreach and a search and personalization expert at Google and IBM. IVP has known Ashutosh since his days at Bloomreach, and we were instantly impressed when we heard the passion and story behind his new venture. Ashutosh and his cofounder Varun Kacholia (who previously led the ranking team at YouTube and the News Feed team at Facebook) have built a talented technology organization, who combine for 80+ patents and more than 6,000 citations for their research. Their deep technical expertise enabled them to build a masterful, highly effective product with a beautiful interface. And best of all, customers love Eightfold.
Comprehensive Product:
Eightfold is not an HR point solution — it truly revolutionizes the way that recruiters and candidates interact throughout the talent acquisition process. Recruiters have long faced several challenges in sourcing the best candidates, from an inundation of applications to difficulty converting the best prospective employees. Eightfold approaches the candidate pipeline problem from both sides with artificial intelligence and a proprietary, differentiated network of data, improving the candidate experience and surfacing the best matches for recruiters.
Speaking with Eightfold customers, we learned how the product leads to better candidate quality and massive time savings. Sourcing talent can be manual and tedious, and moving candidates through the funnel is a painstaking process. Eliminating traditional key-word search and LinkedIn scrolling, Eightfold’s intelligent platform automatically surfaces the set of candidates that are most likely to succeed, offloading much of a recruiter’s busywork in the process. Additionally, Eightfold’s offering helps companies drive their diversity goals forward in an unbiased, data-driven manner. And finally, the platform goes beyond hiring to help HR teams manage the employee experience post-hire and identify existing talent that can be redeployed and retained in new roles. The product is truly end-to-end.
Fantastic Traction:
Although Eightfold only officially launched its platform a year ago, the company’s early traction is incredible. While most HR software companies start by selling almost exclusively to mid-market technology companies, Eightfold’s product is robust enough to serve large, multi-national enterprises like Conagra and Tata Communications. The company has already sold across almost every large vertical and has signed up more than 100 customers (several from the Fortune 500) with no end in sight.
Ashutosh and his team are building a product that fundamentally changes the hiring landscape and enables candidates to find their ideal jobs and companies to build diverse, highly effective workforces. We are thrilled to be taking the Eightfold path with an exceptional team on its mission to solve employment.
Chloe Breider and Jules Maltz are Investors at IVP, a later-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, CA.
