Kula makes the recruitment process tedious – TechCrunch

The process of finding job candidates often involves a lot of tedious manual work for recruiters, such as sending the same email over and over again. That’s how Kula was created. The platform not only automates tasks like sending onboarding messages, but also identifies promising leads from initial contact with the organization’s existing employee base.

Kula today announced that it has raised a $12 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital India and Square Peg Capital with participation from returning investors Venture Highway and Cooperative Fund.

The new funding comes less than six months after Kula’s pre-seed and brings the total raised before public launch to $15 million. It will be used to expand its research and development, production and marketing teams in the United States, Singapore and India.

Before working at Kulan, CEO Achuthanand Ravi worked as a recruiter at tech companies including Stripe, Uber and FreshWorks. In that time, he’s seen marketing and sales teams get increasingly sophisticated technology tools, but the recruiting process is still more or less the same.

Kula helps fix that by integrating and automating workflows with tools used by recruiters, including LinkedIn, Github, Gmail, and Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). For example, it can send introductory messages to promising leads through emails, LinkedIn nudges, and InMails. A feature called Kula Circle consolidates all employee networks into one dashboard, helping employers identify potential candidates from all of their employees’ undergraduate connections. Kula includes analytics to help employers predict and accurately measure their talent pipeline.

Kula is currently pre-revenue with Alpha customers, and will generate revenue by selling to businesses through a go-to-market strategy, mostly focused on the United States. It specifically targets SMBs and mid-market organizations with fewer than 1,000 employees, which Revy says are underserved.

Ravi identified Gem.com, HireEz and Beamery as Kula’s closest competitors. But Gem.com only offers automated outreach as a product, and doesn’t have a Kula Circle-like feature for a referral workflow. HireEZ’s only channel to contact a candidate is email, but Kula’s platform automates email on LinkedIns, an important source of potential leads. Beemery, on the other hand, considers the outsourcing workflow to be only a small part of its platform, Ravi said.

In a statement, Piruze Sabunku, partner at Square Peg Capital, said recruiting is an absolute priority for companies of all sizes, industries and geographies and remains an underserved business function. Kula’s founding team brings an unparalleled combination of recruiting experience and engineering expertise – enabling them to deeply understand the problem and build a solution that fits the organizations they serve.