Nina Achadjian

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CodeSignal secures $50M for its tech hiring platform

In less than a year after raising $25 million in Series B funding, technical assessment company CodeSignal announced a $50 million in Series C funding to offer new features for its platform that helps companies make data-driven hiring decisions to find and test engineering talent.

Similar to attracting a big investor lead for its B round — Menlo Ventures — it has partnered with Index Ventures to lead the C round. Menlo participated again and was joined by Headline and A Capital. This round brings CodeSignal’s total fundraising to $87.5 million.

Co-founder and CEO Tigran Sloyan got the idea for the company from an experience his co-founder and friend Aram Shatakhtsyan had while trying to find an engineering job. Both from Armenia, the two went in different paths for college, with Shatakhtsyan staying in Armenia and Sloyan coming to the U.S. to study at MIT. He then went on to work at Google.

“As companies were recruiting myself and my classmates, Aram was trying to get his resume picked up, but wasn’t getting attention because of where he went to college, even though he was the greatest programmer I had ever known,” Sloyan told TechCrunch. “Hiring talent is the No. 1 problem companies say they have, but here was the best engineer, and no one would bring him in.”

They, along with Sophia Baik, started CodeSignal in 2015 to act as a self-driving interview platform that directly measures skills regardless of a person’s background. Like people needing to take a driver’s test in order to get a license, Sloyan calls the company’s technical assessment technology a “flight simulator for developers,” that gives candidates a simulated evaluation of their skills and comes back with a score and highlighted strengths.

The need by companies to hire engineers has led to CodeSignal growing 3.5 times in revenue year over year and to gather a customer list that includes Brex, Databricks, Facebook, Instacart, Robinhood, Upwork and Zoom.

Sloyan said the company has not yet touched the money it received in its Series B, but wanted to jump at the opportunity to work with Nina Achadjian, partner at Index Ventures, whom he had known for many years since their time together at Google. To work together and for Achadjian to join the company’s board was something “I couldn’t pass up,” Sloyan said.

When Achadjian moved over to venture capital, she helped Sloyan connect to mentors and angel investors while keeping an eye on the company. Hiring engineers is “mission critical” for technology companies, but what became more obvious to her was that engineering functions have become necessary for all companies, Achadjian explained.

While performing due diligence on the space, she saw traditional engineering cultures utilizing CodeSignal, but then would also see nontraditional companies like banks and insurance companies.

“Their traction was undeniable, and many of our portfolio companies were using CodeSignal,” she added. “It is rare to see a company accelerate growth at the stage they are at.”

U.S. Department of Labor statistics estimate there is already a global talent labor shortage of 40 million workers, and that number will grow to over 85 million by 2030. Achadjian says engineering jobs are also expected to increase during that time, and with all of those roles and applicants, vetting candidates will be more important than ever, as will the ability for candidates to apply from wherever they are.

The new funding enabled the company to launch its Integrated Development Environment for candidates to interact with relevant assessment experiences like codes, files and a terminal on a machine that is familiar with them, so that they can showcase their skills, while also being able to preview their application. At the same time, employers are able to assign each candidate the same coding task based on the open position.

In addition, Sloyan intends to triple the company’s headcount over the next couple of months and expand into other use cases for skills assessment.

 

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Index Ventures’ Nina Achadjian and Sarah Cannon: ‘There’s basically an infinite bid’ for growth-stage startups

The venture world is swimming in capital these days, and the flood doesn’t appear to be abating.

That’s changing the game for venture capitalists and their firms, which transformed from solo practitioners focused on one stage and a single geographical area to covering all startups in all geos in all industries in just a handful of years.

One firm that has navigated those changes for decades is Index Ventures, one of the first funds to launch in Europe that has evolved into a multi-stage firm in recent years. The firm last raised a total of $2 billion this past April to continue doubling down on all the deals springing up across the world.

This week on Extra Crunch Live, I interviewed Nina Achadjian and Sarah Cannon, two SF-based partners at Index, to discuss what they are seeing in the market, how VC fundraises have changed and continue to change and how they are adapting to the rise of rolling funds and other new seed vehicles. This was the first time that the two came together for a panel, and our conversation was a real blast.

Here’s an edited and condensed version of the conversation, with highlights of the best insights from the panel.

“It’s not easy to just sit on the sidelines and wait till things sort themselves out.”

TechCrunch: September is traditionally a time for fundraises to kick off for the fall, but in this COVID-19 world, everything is different. Who is fundraising right now and what do you see going on?

Nina Achadjian: Well, there are two things. One, there was an incredible pull from the market for technology tools. So many businesses that had put off buying technology or investing in technology really all of a sudden found themselves in a digitally-first world or a digital-only world and therefore, there was a massive pull for technology products. It’s the reason why companies like Shopify and others in the public markets have had just amazing, record quarters.

The second thing is, in venture when we raise these funds, we have a certain time period to deploy them, usually anywhere from two years to five years. So for us as investors, it’s not easy to just sit on the sidelines and wait till things sort themselves out.

So actually, a lot of venture investors have piggybacked off of this incredible pull from the market side and have been investing, I would say, at the same pace, or even a faster pace than we were before.

“There’s basically an infinite bid for these companies.”

Are those paces the same for all stages?

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Extra Crunch Live: Join us today at 2pm EDT/11am PDT to discuss the future of startup investing with Index Ventures VCs Nina Achadjian and Sarah Cannon

The venture capital world is rapidly changing, and thank heavens we have two of the smartest VCs on the future of investing, productivity tools and remote work joining us today to make sense of all the noise.

On Extra Crunch Live today, Sarah Cannon and Nina Achadjian, two VC partners based in Index Ventures’ SF office, will talk about these subjects and more. Plus, we will be taking questions from the audience, so come prepared. Login details are below the fold for EC members, and if you don’t have an Extra Crunch membership, click through to sign up.

As I wrote when we announced the slate last week:

First, we have Nina Achadjian, who officially joined Index Ventures several years ago out of the firm’s SF office and was promoted to partner earlier this year. Achadjian has been searching for and investing into some of the most interesting new collaborative companies that are rebuilding the enterprise from the ground up (which happens to have been a brilliant move given our remote-work world this year). Her investments include such companies as product-management service productboard, sales performance platform Gong, executive assistant marketplace Double and real estate services platform ServiceTitan.

Second, we have Sarah Cannon, who joined Index in 2018 from CapitalG, and who is also based officially out of SF. Cannon made a splash earlier this year with her bullish bet on note-taking and team productivity wunderkind Notion, and has also invested in productivity tools like collaborative presentation software Pitch and smart team messaging app Quill.

Join us today at 2 p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT/6 p.m. GMT.

Event Details

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