TestGorilla, an Amsterdam-based online skills assessment platform, announced on Tuesday that it has secured $70M in a Series A round of funding co-led by London-based venture capital firms Atomico and Balderton Capital.
The latest funding round brings the Dutch company’s total investment to $80M. As a part of the investment round, Luca Eisenstecken from Atomico and James Wise from Balderton Capital will join the board. The company will use the funds to expand its test library and hire 100 new employees in the coming years.
“Too often, the recruitment process requires hiring managers to spend hours screening unreliable, incomplete, subjective CVs,” says TestGorilla’s co-founder Wouter Durville. “By replacing resumes with more than 220 scientifically validated tests, our platform helps eliminate hiring bias, creating a level playing field where every candidate can compete on equal terms.”
Makes recruitment process fair
Founded by Otto Verhage and Wouter Durville in 2019, TestGorilla makes the recruitment process more fair, efficient, and data-driven by enabling organisations to use skills assessments as soon as candidates apply for open roles.
The platform offers an online pre-employment testing platform with a wide-ranging library of more than 220 scientifically validated tests.
It can be used to assess candidates’ skills in specific job-related skills, language proficiency, cognitive abilities, motivation, personality, and culture add.
The Dutch platform helps companies save valuable time and avoid expensive mis-hires by remotely assessing factors like role-related skills, language proficiency, cognitive abilities, soft skills, personality, motivation, and culture add.
The ongoing development of TestGorilla’s proprietary technology will include the platform’s integration with further Applicant Tracking Systems, enabling employers to use the product seamlessly from within their existing ATS, and the introduction of new features to satisfy the requirements of mid-sized businesses.
Investors
Atomico is a VC firm partnering with the boldest founders to solve the future’s biggest challenges. The VC firm provides access to capital to a progressive and diverse founder base, share operational excellence to supercharge their growth, and partner with them on their scale-up journey. To date, Atomico has partnered with 112 ambitious teams, including 23 billion-dollar companies.
“Finding the right people is increasingly challenging for even the world’s best brands, and the pandemic has opened employer eyes to huge untapped pools of global talent,” says Atomico’s partner Luca Eisenstecken. “TestGorilla is seeing incredible growth with its automated, data-driven approach to solving this problem. And they’re doing this while delivering a fairer hiring process based on skills rather than resumes, eliminating the biases that prejudice decision making.”
Balderton Capital is a venture capital firm focused on backing the best European-founded technology companies. In the two decades, Balderton has worked with hundreds of founders and has raised $4.5B across ten funds to support businesses at both early and growth stages.
“Our portfolio companies hire more than 10,000 people a year and across the board, they have been looking for ways to remove bias while giving candidates the best hiring experience. It’s clear that traditional hiring practices have failed on both these fronts, and that this has only been exacerbated by Covid-19 and the rise of remote hiring,” says James Wise, partner at Balderton Capital. “We’ve already seen TestGorilla become wildly popular within our portfolio as a more effective and fair way to identify people with the right skills for the role, and we’re excited to support the team on their mission to end the era of CV-based candidate screening.”