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Apna raises $70 million to help workers in India secure jobs
Indian cities are home to hundreds of millions of low-skilled workers who hail from villages in search of work. Many of them have lost their jobs amid the coronavirus pandemic that has slowed several economic activities in the world’s second-largest internet market.
Apna, a startup by an Apple alum, is helping millions of such blue and gray-collar workers upskill themselves, find communities and land jobs. On Wednesday it announced its acceptance by the market has helped it raise $70 million in a new financing round as the startup prepares to scale the 16-month-old app across India.
Insight Partners and Tiger Global co-led Apna’s $70 million Series B round, which valued the startup at $570 million. Existing investors Lightspeed India, Sequoia Capital India, Greenoaks Capital and Rocketship VC also participated in the round, which brings Apna’s to-date raise to over $90 million.
The startup, whose name is inspired from a 2019 Bollywood song, at its core is solving the network gap issue for workers. “Someone born in a privileged family goes to the best school, best college and makes acquaintance with influential people. Many born just a few kilometres away are dealt with a whole different kind of life and never see such opportunities,” said Nirmit Parikh, founder and chief executive of Apna, in an interview with TechCrunch.
Apna is building a scalable networking infrastructure, something that doesn’t currently exist in the market, so that these workers can connect to the right employers and secure jobs. “Apna’s focus on digitizing the process of job discovery, application and employer candidate interaction has the potential to revolutionize the hiring process,” said Griffin Schroeder, a partner at Tiger Global, in a statement.
The workers in India “already have a champion in them, we are just helping them find opportunities,” said Nirmit Parikh, founder and chief executive of Apna. (Apna)
The startup’s eponymous Android app, available in multiple languages, features more than 70 communities today for skilled professionals such as carpenters, painters, field sales agents and many others.
On the app, users connect to each other and help with leads and share tips to improve at their jobs. The app also offers people the opportunity to upskill themselves, practice with their interview performance, and become eligible for even more jobs. The startup said it’s building Masterclass-like skilling modules, outcome or job based skilling, and also enabling peer-to-peer learning via its vertical communities. It plans to launch career counselling and resume building feature.
And that bet is working. The startup has amassed over 10 million users and just last month it facilitated more than 15 million job interviews, said Parikh. All jobs listed on the Apna platform are verified by the startup and free of cost for the candidates.
Apna has partnered with some of India’s leading public and private organizations and is providing support to the Ministry of Minority Affairs of India, National Skill Development Corporation and UNICEF YuWaah to provide better skilling and job opportunities to candidates.
Apna app (Apna)
More than 100,000 recruiters — including Byju’s, Unacademy, Flipkart, Zomato, Licious, Burger King, Dunzo, Bharti-AXA, Delhivery, Teamlease, G4S Global and Shadowfax — in the country today use Apna’s platform, where they have to spend less than five minutes to post job posts and are connect to hyperlocal candidates with relevant skills in within two days.
Apna has built the “market leading platform for India’s workforce to establish digital professional identity, network, access skills training, and find high quality jobs,” said Nikhil Sachdev, managing director, Insight Partners, in a statement.
“Employers are engaging with Apna at a rapid pace to help find high quality talent with low friction which is leading to best in class customer satisfaction scores. We believe that our investment will enable Apna to continue their steep growth trajectory, scale up their operations, and improve access to opportunities for India’s workforce.”
The startup plans to deploy the fresh capital to scale across India and eventually take the app to international markets, said Parikh. Apna, which has recently seen high-profile individuals from firms such as Uber, BCG and Swiggy join the firm, is also actively hiring for several tech roles in the South Asian market.
Apna has built the infrastructure and brand awareness in the market that it can launch in a new city within two days and drive over 10,000 interviews there in less than two days, it said.
“Our first goal is to restart India’s economy in the next couple of months and do whatever we can to help,” said Parikh, who was part of the iPhone product-operations team at Apple.
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Freelancer marketplace Toptal sues Andela and ex-employees, alleging theft of trade secrets
The war for talent in the tech world can be brutal — and so, it turns out, can the war between platforms that help companies source it. In the latest developement, Toptal — a marketplace for filling engineering and other tech roles with freelance, remote workers — has filed a lawsuit against direct competitor Andela and several of its employees, alleging the theft of trade secrets in pursuit of “a perfect clone of its business”, according to the complaint. All of the Andela employees previously worked at Toptal.
Toptal’s lawsuit, filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York and embedded below, alleges that the employees reneged on confidentiality, non-solicitation and non-compete agreements with Toptal. Toptal also alleges interference with contract, unfair competition and misappropriation of trade secrets.
While both Toptal and Andela have built businesses around the idea of remote freelancers filling tech jobs — a concept that has increased in profile and acceptance as people shifted to remote work during the pandemic — the pair only emerged as very direct competitors in the last year or so.
Toptal was co-founded by CEO Taso Du Val in 2010, and since then it has grown to become one of the world’s most popular on-demand talent networks. The company matches skilled tech personnel like engineers, software developers, designers, finance experts and product managers to clients across the globe. According to company data, it currently serves over 1,000 clients in more than 10 countries.
Andela, on the other hand, only recently turned to using a similar approach. Founded in 2014 in Lagos, Andela’s original business model was based on building physical hubs to source, vet, train and house talent across the continent. It did this in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda.
However, Andela struggled with scaling and operating that business model, and in 2019 it laid off 400 developers. Early last year as the pandemic took hold, it laid off a further 135 employees. However this time around it did so with a strategy pivot in mind: after testing satellite models in Egypt and Ghana, the talent company decided to go forego physical hubs completely and go remote, first across Africa in 2020 and globally this year.
“We thought, ‘What if we accelerated [the African remote network] and just enabled applicants from anywhere?’ Because it was always the plan to become a global company. That was clear, but the timing was the question,” Andela CEO Jeremy Johnson told TechCrunch in April.
Yet Toptal believes Andela’s choice to scrap its hubs and source remote talent from everywhere was specifically to replicate Toptal’s business model — and success.
“Until recently, Andela operated an outsourcing operation focused on in-person, on-site hubs in Africa,” Toptal notes in the complaint. “Over the course of the past year, Andela has moved away from its prior focus on in-person hubs situated in Africa and is engaging in a barely disguised attempt to become a clone of Toptal.”
Toptal claims that for Andela to pull off a “perfect clone of its business,” it poached key Toptal employees to exploit their knowledge, and that the ex-employees knowingly breached their confidentiality and non-solicitation obligations to Toptal.
Companies often try to uncover each other’s trade secrets by poaching, and many blatantly copy a competitor and do so without repercussions. On top of this, these two are hardly the only two places to for tech talent to connect with remote freelance job opportunities. Others include Fiverr, Malt, Freelancer.com, LinkedIn, Turing, Upwork and many more.
In a global economy with an estimated 1 billion so-called knowledge workers, and with freelancers accounting for some 35% of the world’s workforce, it’s a pretty gigantic market, which you could alternately look at as a major opportunity, but also a ripe field for many players with multiple permutations of the marketplace concept.
So why is Toptal crying foul play? The company says its ex-employees have not only revealed Toptal’s trade secrets and confidential information to compete unfairly but are also poaching additional Toptal personnel, clients and the talent that Toptal matches and sources to clients.
The ex-employees cited by Toptal include Sachin Bhagwata, vice president of enterprise; Martin Chikilian, head of talent operations; Courtney Machi, vice president of product; and Alvaro Oliveira, executive vice president of talent operations. Toptal says three additional former employees in non-executive roles breached express covenants not to compete in their agreements with Toptal.
While some of the allegations focus on the expertise of the employees, one of the trade secret allegations more directly references Toptal’s technology.
Toptal claims Machi tapped into her extensive knowledge of Toptal’s “proprietary software platform” and used that to help transform Andela “from a group of outsourcing hubs situated in various African locations into a fully remote, global company like Toptal.”
Asked to comment on the suit, Johnson at Andela said he believes Toptal is suing Andela for being competitive.
“With regards to the situation overall, I can say that frivolous lawsuits are the price of doing anything that matters,” he told TechCrunch in an email. “And this is the kind of baseless bullying and fear tactics that make employees want to leave in the first place. We will defend ourselves and our colleagues vigorously.”
Toptal has an unconventional story for a company that started only a decade ago. It is one of the few companies in the Valley that doesn’t issue stock options to its investors or employees. Even Du Val’s co-founder, Breanden Beneschott, was ousted from the company without any shares, according to an article from The Information.
How did it pull this off? In 2012, Toptal raised a $1.4 million seed via convertible notes and investors were entitled to 15% of the company, according to The Information article.
But there was one condition: Toptal had to raise more money.
However, the company hasn’t needed to secure additional capital because of its profitability and growing revenue ($200 million annually as of 2018, per The Information). So investors are stuck in limbo — as are employees who joined hoping that the company would raise money down the line so their stock options would convert.
The Information story strikes a distinct note of resentment, noting that some employees felt “tricked out of stock in a company that Du Val has said publicly is worth more than $1 billion.”
Given that situation, TechCrunch asked Du Val if he thought it played any role in employee departures, and ex-employee relations.
“The issuance of stock options does not excuse theft of trade secrets,” he replied. “Also, there are more than 800 full-time people at Toptal [but] the complaint names seven individual defendants.”
The full complaint is embedded below.
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Ahead of Dell’s spin out, VMware appoints longtime exec Raghu Raghuram as its new CEO
Five months after it was announced that Pal Gelsinger would be stepping down as CEO of VMware to take the top job at Intel, the virtualization giant has finally appointed a permanent successor. Raghu Raghuram — a longtime employee of the company — has been appointed the new CEO. He will be taking on the new role on June 1. Until then, CFO Zane Rowe will continue in the role in the interim.
Raghuram has been with the company for 17 years in a variety of roles, most recently COO of products and cloud services. He’s also held positions at the company overseeing areas like data centers and VMware’s server business. Putting a veteran at the helm sends a clear message that VMware has picked someone clearly dedicated to the company and its culture. No drama here.
Indeed, the move is coming at a time when there is already a lot of other change underway and speaks to the company looking for stability and continuity to lead it through that. About a month ago, Dell confirmed long-anticipated news that it would be spinning out its stake in VMware in a deal that’s expected to bring Dell at least $9 billion — putting to an end a financial partnership that initially kicked off with an eye-watering acquisition of EMC in 2016. That partnership will not end the strategic relationship, however, which is set to continue and now Raghuram will be in charge of building and leading.
For that reason, you might look at this as a deal nodded through significantly by Dell.
“I am thrilled to have Raghu step into the role of CEO at VMware. Throughout his career, he has led with integrity and conviction, playing an instrumental role in the success of VMware,” said Michael Dell, chairman of the VMware board of directors, in a statement. “Raghu is now in position to architect VMware’s future, helping customers and partners accelerate their digital businesses in this multicloud world.”
Raghuram has not only been the person overseeing some of VMware’s biggest divisions and newer areas like software-defined networking and cloud computing, but he’s had a central role in building and driving strategy for the company’s core virtualization business, been involved with M&A and, as VMware points out, “key in driving partnerships with Dell Technologies,” among other partners.
“VMware is uniquely poised to lead the multicloud computing era with an end-to-end software platform spanning clouds, the data center and the edge, helping to accelerate our customers’ digital transformations,” said Raghuram in a statement. “I am honored, humbled and excited to have been chosen to lead this company to a new phase of growth. We have enormous opportunity, we have the right solutions, the right team and we will continue to execute with focus, passion and agility.”
The company also took the moment to update on guidance for its Q1 results, which will be coming out on May 27. Revenues are expected to come in at $2.994 billion, up 9.5% versus the same quarter a year ago. Subscription and SaaS and license revenue, meanwhile, is expected to be $1.387 billion, up 12.5%. GAAP net income per diluted share is expected to be $1.01 per diluted share, and non-GAAP net income per diluted share is expected to be $1.76 per diluted share, it said.
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Blind raises $37M to double down on workplace gossip and career advice
Blind has carved out a unique niche in the social-networking world. It’s an app of verified, pseudonymous employees talking to each other about what’s going on at their employers, trading notes on everything from layoffs, to promotions, to policies. Part LinkedIn, part Reddit, part Slack — it’s become widely popular among tech workers at Silicon Valley companies, and even outside the tech industry, with 5 million verified users.
Workplaces have changed dramatically post-COVID-19, with remote work becoming more of a norm, and that has made Blind indispensable for many workers who feel increasingly alienated from their companies and their colleagues.
The company announced this morning a $37 million Series C funding round led by South Korean venture firm Mainstreet Investment along with Cisco Investments and Pavilion Capital, a subsidiary of Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek. The company had filed a Form D in late March for roughly $20.5 million, and the $37 million represents the final total fundraised.
We last did a deep dive in the company back in 2018, so what’s changed? Well, first, there’s the pandemic. Co-founder and general manager Kyum Kim says that Blind’s users are now coming to the app all throughout the day. “Usage used to peak during the commute times,” he said. “8-10 a.m. before COVID and then after work, 7 a.m.-10 p.m. was another timeframe that people used to use Blind a lot. But now, it has kind of flattened out [throughout the day].” The new peak is 2 p.m., and, according to Kim, users are logging in 30 times per month over about 13-15 days.
This gets to the first of two areas where Blind is experimenting with revenue generation. As remote work has taken hold, particularly at tech companies, internal messaging channels have become less valuable as sources for clear information from executive leadership. Blind believes it has a better pulse on how employees are feeling about policies and their employers, and is building tools around, for example, pulse surveys to give HR teams better insight than they might get from other services.
“People are just more honest on our platform versus these company-sponsored channels,” Kim said. We’re “probably the only platform where people are coming voluntarily, have visibility into their intentions, how they feel about their company’s policies.” Blind wants to protect the identities of its users, while also offering aggregate insights to companies.
To that end, last week the company brought on Young Yuk as chief product officer. Yuk had been an advisor to Blind for the past four years, while daylighting in senior product roles at Intuit, Yelp and Glassdoor. Kim believes that Yuk’s experience across consumer and enterprise will fit the unique needs of Blind’s business, which combines a consumer social network with B2B products.
For its own users though, the second area of attention is perhaps the most interesting: recruiting. Blind users are obsessed with career paths and compensation, and Kim said that “80% of our search keywords on Blind are company names or company names attached to levels, locations, or teams.” People want to know how to move their careers forward, an area companies are notoriously bad about explaining, and so “people come to Blind to find information from these verified employees.”
Blind is building what it calls “Talent by Blind,” a platform for capturing this hiring intentionality and selling it to recruiters. The goal is to transfer people whose intentions might be, say, L5 engineer at a big tech company in Seattle to a separate platform that can be used as a top-of-funnel for company recruitment efforts. Blind says a couple of companies are currently using this platform.
“Talent by Blind” is a platform to help transfer potential recruits into the top of the recruiting funnel at companies. Image Credits: Blind
Ultimately, Blind’s path has been one of slow and steady growth. The company claims to be deliberate in that approach, noting that pseudonymous communities often falter when they grow too fast and norms aren’t established early. Unlike more notorious anonymous communities from years past like Secret or YikYak, the company says that its network tends to be quite safe, since employees verify their identities and know that they are speaking directly to their colleagues.
Blind’s team has expanded in recent years. Image Credits: Blind
Revenue approaches remain experimental, but ultimately, the key is that it has the users that companies want to hear from: their own employees and potential future employees. We want to “maintain that integrity with users,” Kim said. “ ‘Ally to employees and advisor to companies’ is the phrase we are trying to go for.”
“It’s been eight years we have been doing this business, [and] we have been focused on the longness,” he said. “There’s a lot of optimism in the company.” He would know — he probably checked Blind.
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IAC’s NurseFly rebrands to Vivian Health as it expands its healthcare jobs marketplace
NurseFly, the healthcare jobs marketplace owned by IAC, has rebranded to Vivian Health as it expands its range of services. Originally launched for traveling nurses (or nurses willing to travel for short-term positions), Vivian Health now includes listings for permanent positions, per diem shifts and local openings. It also added employer reviews and a pay database that uses information gathered from the 1.7 million jobs that have come through its system.
Founded in 2017, NurseFly was acquired by IAC in August 2019. It is used by providers like AMN Healthcare, Cross Country Healthcare, Host Healthcare, Trinity Health, SSM Health and Honor Health. During the pandemic, Vivian Health quadrupled its employee headcount in order to meet demand, founder and chief executive officer Parth Bhakta told TechCrunch in an email.
“Over the past year, we’ve grown to fill nearly 10% of all travel nursing positions across the United States, oftentimes helping fill a crisis position in a matter of hours rather than weeks,” Bhakta said. During that time, the platform heard from major health systems “that their challenges around hiring for permanent roles were oftentimes even more dire than filling their travel positions,” he added. “Permanent roles at health systems were taking months to fill, costing tens of thousands of dollars to hire, and leading to short-staffed facilities in the meantime.”
As a result of these conversations, Vivian Health’s team spent three months rebuilding the platform to serve a wider range of healthcare providers and employers. Its rebranding and expansion comes at a time when many healthcare professionals are reporting burnout as a result of the pandemic.
In a study of 1,300 respondents published earlier this month, Vivian Health found that 83% said their mental health had been affected by working in healthcare over the past year. About 43% said they had considered quitting the profession.
One of the main reasons for burnout is working overtime, with 86% of their respondents reporting that their facilities are short-staffed, even as demand for healthcare professionals accelerates. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), about 17.3 million people were employed in the healthcare sector in 2018, and that number is expected to increase 15% to 19.9 million by 2028, making it one of the fastest-growing sectors.
“Crisis-level staffing shortages” are compounded by the amount of time, sometimes up to 120 days, it can take to hire a permanent employee. Shortening the amount of time it takes to fill positions has a ripple effect because clinicians need to work less overtime. Meanwhile, recruiters can focus on the right leads. Bhakta said employers have been able to use Vivian Health to fill permanent positions in as little as one week, and are typically able to do so within 30 days.
Vivian Heath built a proprietary data set of healthcare industry information through the 1.7 million jobs that have come through its systems and asks all of its staffing agency partners to include pay rates in their listings. As a result, job seekers are able to see how a position’s compensation compares against the market, while employers can quickly adjust their rates to be more competitive.
Bhakta said Vivian Health added pay information because “our business is built on transparency, which we believe is a crucial element in solving the healthcare hiring crisis.”
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As companies prioritize diversity, startups are trying to productize diverse hiring
When the iconic American power tools company Stanley Black & Decker began looking for ways to improve the pipeline of diverse candidates that the company was reviewing for potential roles, it turned to an Israeli-based startup called Talenya for help.
The company wasn’t alone in looking to startups for support in new hiring initiatives. Last year’s social reckoning that occurred in the wake of nationwide protests against systemic racism triggered by the murder of George Floyd pushed companies around the country to reassess their own role in perpetuating inequality.
As part of that assessment, companies came to the realization that the hiring tools they’d been using to simplify the process of recruiting, cultivating and promoting talent weren’t capturing the broadest and most capable applicants.
“If we want to claim that it’s a pipeline issue, we would first have to claim that we’ve hired what is available in the pipeline,” Uber Chief Diversity Officer Bo Young Lee told TechCrunch. “It’s not a pipeline issue as much as it is a recruiting process challenge.”
That’s where tools like Talenya, Textio, TalVista, WayUp, Handshake, The Mom Project, Flockjay, Kanarys, JumpStart and SeekOut have come in. All told, these companies have raised more than $200 million in financing over the past few years to increase diversity and inclusion and help solve tech’s diversity problem.
“Part of our diversity, inclusion and belonging strategy focuses on having a diverse pipeline to ensure incoming talent better reflects the markets and communities we serve. To accelerate our progress, we started using Talenya’s AI software in 2020 to help increase the candidate pool of women and people of color,” said Suzan Morno-Wade, EVP and chief human resources officer at Xerox, another company using Talenya’s software, in a statement.
It seems that women and people of color use fewer keywords and are less effusive when they describe themselves in profiles or on job applications, according to a recent study published by Talenya.
That’s why startups like Talenya and Textio try to highlight how to improve the screening process for candidates by using broader language in both the text of the job description (Textio) and in the filters used to select qualified candidates (Talenya).
“Keyword search is highly discriminatory to everyone,” said Talenya chief executive and co-founder Gal Almog. “Minorities and women tend to put 20% to 30% less skills on their profiles. That applies not only to women and to minorities. We added an algorithm that can predict and add missing skills.”
In some ways, that functionality seems a lot like tools on offer from companies like SeekOut, the recruiting startup that just landed a whopping $65 million round from investors including Tiger Global, Madrona Group and Mayfield.
“The focus on diversity hiring and our unique approach to finding the talent and offering blind hiring features has super charged the adoption,” chief executive Anoop Gupta said in an interview earlier this year. That same toolkit is something that Talenya pitches its own customers.
Meanwhile, businesses like WayUp are attempting to give employers a window into how the funnel narrows after the screening process. The company’s new tool provides an assessment for how diverse applicant pools are slowly winnowed down to a group of candidates that is far less diverse through the testing process.
WayUp co-founder and chief executive Liz Wessel said that the pool of applicants often narrows significantly after a battery of technical assessment and programming tests.
“Similar to the SATs, many technical assessments have high correlation to socioeconomics status,” Wessel told TechCrunch.
While some startups focus on the hiring process itself, other companies are taking approaches to diversify-specific jobs or to try to recruit from particular talent pools to help increase diversity in the tech industry.
That’s the mission that companies like Flockjay and The Mom Project have set for themselves.
“Most people don’t even know that a job in tech sales is even a possibility,” Shaan Hathiramani, the founder and chief executive of Flockjay, a company offering a tech sales training curriculum to the masses, said earlier this year.
Hathiramani said his startup could be an on-ramp to the tech industry for legions of workers who have the skill sets to work in tech, but lack the network to see themselves in the business. Just like coding bootcamps have enabled thousands to get jobs as programmers in the tech business, Flockjay helps talented people who had never considered a job in tech get into the industry.
It’s a way for non-coders to leverage soft-skills they’d developed in other industries, including retail and food services, to jump into the higher paid world of tech companies. And it’s a way for those tech companies to find a more diverse pool of workers who can bring different skill sets and perspectives to the table.
A few hundred students have gone through the program so far, Hathiramani said, and the goal is to train 1,000 people over the course of 2021. The average income of a student before they go through Flockjay’s training program is $30,000 to $35,000 typically, Hathiramani said.
Upon graduation, those students can expect to make between $75,000 and $85,000, he said.
It’s obvious that tech needs to “do better” on inclusion, and The Mom Project — a Chicago startup that focuses on connecting women, including parents, with jobs from organizations specifically open to employing people who meet that profile — is one company tackling an aspect of the problem that’s become acute in the pandemic.
“Sixty percent of the job losses in the pandemic have been women, and the statistics have been even worse for women of color,” said Mom Project chief executive Allison Robinson. “It’s like a canary in the coal mine.”
While The Mom Project doesn’t have any tools today to surface candidates that meet more diverse profiles on that front, Robinson told TechCrunch that they are considering it and how to approach that in a way that works.
Ultimately these are considerations that matter for companies of any size, according to Bain Capital Ventures managing director, Sarah Smith.
“No matter what, it’s important that from day one [that] you have an eye on how to build an inclusive culture, where in an ideal world, even that first person you’re bringing onto the team could walk in and feel fairly welcomed. And… you really want people to bring their best selves and they bring their perspectives and their ideas,” Smith told the audience at TechCrunch’s Early Stage Conference. “I think it’s pretty common that a team might grow to like four or five from within the network, including the founders, [but] I think once you get to like number six, if you don’t have some type of gender or racial diversity yet… it’s gonna start to get really tough.”
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WayUp’s new dashboard helps employers see where their recruiting process loses diverse candidates
WayUp started out as a platform to help college graduates find jobs and internships, but over time, it has increasingly focused on helping employers find diverse job candidates. And it recently introduced a new feature to help those employers see exactly where their diversity and inclusion efforts may be falling short.
Co-founder and CEO Liz Wessel explained that when companies aren’t hiring enough employees from diverse backgrounds, recruiters and executives often assume “we’re not getting enough of those candidates at the top of our funnel.” That idea, she suggested, is exemplified by Wells Fargo CEO Charles Schlarf’s controversial remarks last fall, when he said the company wasn’t reaching its diversity goals because there simply aren’t enough qualified candidates.
Wessel suggested that when you take a closer look at the data, you find that the initial outreach and recruiting is only part of the problem. WayUp’s new dashboard allows employers to track this, because it shows the demographic (race and gender) breakdown of the candidate pool at each part of the funnel.
For example, Wessel said that many employers hiring for technical roles discover that they’re reaching a relatively diverse candidate pool during their initial outreach, and that the pool stays diverse during the first interviews — only to become much more white and male after the technical assessments/programming tests.
Image Credits: WayUp
“Similar to the SATs, many technical assessments have high correlation to socioeconomics status,” she said.
Upon discovering this, some recruiters may choose to stop requiring these tests. Others may choose to keep them — but thanks to WayUp, at least they know where the breakdown is really happening.
After Wessel showed me the dashboard, I wondered why other hiring platforms didn’t offer something similar. In a follow-up email, she suggested that many platforms don’t realize that achieving these goals requires more than just getting a diverse pool of candidates. Plus, she said WayUp is “one of the only sourcing/job platforms that I know of that has candidates self-report their race/ethnicity, gender and veteran status (in an EEOC/OFCCP compliant way).”
She added, “We really are focusing on having our platform make it so your entire hiring process is equitable and optimizes for employers hiring a diverse workforce, [versus] putting a Band-Aid or quick fix on the issue by just sourcing more diverse candidates at the top of your funnel.”
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Andela begins global expansion in 37 countries months after going remote across Africa
More than a year after the pandemic began, remote work shows no signs of going away. While it has its cons, it remains top of mind for potential employees around the world before joining a new company.
But while most people in Africa still go to physical offices despite the pandemic, a few companies have nevertheless embraced this concept. Andela, a New York-based startup that helps tech companies build remote engineering teams from Africa, was one of the first to publicly announce it was going remote on the continent.
Today, it is doubling down on this effort by announcing the global expansion of its engineering talent. Over the past six months, the company has seen a 750% increase in applicants outside Africa. More than 30% of Andela’s inbound engineer applications also came from outside the continent in March alone. Half this number came from Latin America while Africa saw a 500% increase in applications as well.
When Andela launched in 2014, it built hubs in Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda to source, vet and train engineers to be part of remote teams for international companies. It also tested satellite models in Egypt and Ghana as substitutes to physical hubs.
The company would issue a call for applications, select a few (less than 1%), pay them a salary for the first six months and provide them with housing and food. It also helped developers improve their skills via training and mentorship. Over 100,000 engineers have taken part in the company’s learning network and community, and, as of 2019, Andela had more than 1,500 engineers on its payroll.
However, after noticing that this model wasn’t sustainable, it began to make changes.
In September 2019, it let go of 420 junior engineers across Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria. Nine months later, citing the pandemic, it laid off 135 employees while introducing salary cuts for senior staff. But despite the layoffs, the pandemic provided some form of clarity to how Andela wanted to operate — which was remote, judging by the success of the satellite models.
“In the very beginning, a developer had to be in Lagos to work with Andela. Then it became living in Nigeria. Then Kenya. Then Uganda, Rwanda,” CEO Jeremy Johnson told TechCrunch. “Before the pandemic, Andela was opening applications in country after country. The pandemic came and changed that as we opened up to the entire continent.”
Shutting down its existing physical campuses and going remote also helped the company focus on getting engineers with more experience to meet its clients’ requirements. That experiment, which the company conducted in less than a year, is also part of its mission to be a global company.
“That went so well and we thought ‘what if we accelerated it now that we’re remote and just enable applicants from anywhere?’ because it was always the plan to become a global company. That was clear, but the timing was the question. We did that and it’s been an amazing experiment,” Johnson added.
Now with its global expansion, its clients can tap into regional expertise to support international growth.
According to a statement released by the firm, it currently has engineers from 37 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, North America and Europe.
Johnson didn’t go into details about how many of these engineers are getting jobs from Andela or even its total developer count. He’s more interested in helping its clients solve the diversity issues that have plagued many Western corporations.
Andela is currently working with eight companies that have hired its engineers in Latin America and Africa. In addition to the diversity play, the CEO says that means Andela engineers get to prove themselves on a global playing field in a way the company has “always wanted to see.”
Andela serves more than 200 customers, including GitHub, ViacomCBS, Pluralsight, Seismic, Cloudflare, Coursera and InVision. GitHub is one company that seems to be benefitting from Andela’s new offerings. The company’s VP of Engineering, Dana Lawson, in a statement said, “As a business in the developer tool space, a lot of us are trying to enter those areas of the world (Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa) where the emergent developers are coming so we can better understand their needs. Having a local presence there with amazing talent is super valuable to building a global product.”
Image Credits: Andela
In its quest to become a global company, going up against competition is unavoidable for the seven-year-old company. But since most of these companies are horizontal marketplaces (providing a wide range of expertise), whereas Andela is vertical, Johnson believes there’s enough market share to be acquired by the company.
“We are focused on building digital products, and because of that, we’re able to do more, essentially, for our customers… That’s where our focus is — [building long-term relationships] and around building great digital products,” the CEO said.
The company was founded by Jeremy Johnson, Christina Sass, Nadayar Enegesi, Ian Carnevale, Brice Nkengsa and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji. It has raised more than $180 million (up to Series D) from firms like Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Generation Investment Management, Google Ventures and Spark Capital, at a valuation of about $700 million.
While announcing the layoffs last year, Andela said it was on an annual revenue run rate of $50 million. But when asked how this number has changed over the past year, Johnson said the company is “growing at a healthier pace as we’ve ever had.”
The future of remote work is global and Johnson believes Andela provides the vital link to talent wherever it is found. The company’s head of talent operations, Martin Chikilian, echoed similar sentiments regarding the expansion.
“We’ve seen exponential growth and interest from engineers from across Africa who want to work with some of the world’s most exciting technology-focused companies,” he said. “Growing our network of talent from Africa to include more markets is a unique proposition and we continue to match talent with opportunity beyond geographical boundaries.”
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How Pariti is connecting founders with capital, resources and talent in emerging markets
According to Startup Genome, Beijing, London, Silicon Valley, Stockholm and Tel Aviv are some of the world’s best startup ecosystems. The data and research organisation uses factors like performance, capital, market reach, connectedness, talent and knowledge to produce its rankings.
Startup ecosystems from emerging markets excluding China and India didn’t make the organisation’s top 40 list last year. It is a known fact that these regions lag well behind in all six factors, and decades might pass before they catch up to the standards of the aforementioned ecosystems.
However, Pariti, a Kenyan B2B management startup founded by Yacob Berhane and Wossen Ayele, wants to close the gap on three of the six factors — access to capital, knowledge and talent.
These issues, specifically that of access to capital, is heightened in Africa. For instance, only 25% of funding goes to early-stage startups in Sub-Saharan Africa compared to more than 50% in Latin America, MENA and South Asia regions.
“We wanted to build a solution that will help startups be successful that otherwise would not have been able to get the resources they needed,” CEO Berhane told TechCrunch. “This problem is especially acute in Africa because it’s particularly nascent, but this platform is designed for founders across emerging markets. So basically anywhere that doesn’t have a mature, healthy startup ecosystem.”
So, how is the team at Pariti setting out to solve these problems? Ayele tells me that in one sense, Pariti is like an unbundled accelerator.
In a typical accelerator, founders will need to go through an intense program where they are loaded with information on all the things a startup will likely need to know at some point in their growth. Whereas with Pariti, founders get the needed information or resources that are immediately relevant to helping them get to the next stage of the business.
A three-way marketplace
When a founder joins Pariti, they run their company through an assessment tool. There, they share pitch materials and information about their business. Pariti then assesses each company across more than 70 information points ranging from the team and market to product and economics.
After this is done, Pariti benchmarks each company against its peers. Companies in the same industry, product stage, revenue and fundraising are some of the comparisons made. The founder gets a detailed assessment with feedback on their pitch materials, the underlying metrics that they can use to develop their business and their ability to raise capital down the line.
“This approach gives us an extremely granular view of their businesses, its strengths, weaknesses and allows us to triage the right resources to the founder based on their particular needs,” Ayele said.
It doesn’t end there. Pariti also connects the founders for one-on-one sessions with members of its global expert community. Their backgrounds, according to Ayele, run the gamut from finance and marketing to product and technology across a range of sectors. Pariti also provides vetted professionals for hire from its community if a founder needs more hands-on support building a product.
Ayele says founders can continue to go through this process multiple times, getting assessed, implementing feedback and connecting with resources and talent.
On another end, Pariti allows investors to sign up on its platform, thereby collating data on their preferences. So once a startup wants to raise capital, the platform matches them with investors based on their profile and preferences.
“We’ve built an algorithm-based matching platform where we curate relevant deals to VC investors. We also simplify the investor reach-out process for founders, which is a huge pain point — especially in this ecosystem,” Ayele added.
Pariti’s investor platform
In a nutshell, Pariti helps founders connect with affordable talent, access capital and develop their businesses. Professionals can find interesting opportunities to mentor startups and get paid gig opportunities. They also get more exposure to the early-stage ecosystem while tracking their progress, verifying their skills and increasing earning potential. Investors can run extremely lean operations with access to proprietary deal flow, automated deal filtering and on-demand experts to support due diligence, research and portfolio support.
According to the COO, the company has seen a tremendous amount of value built through the platform so far. A testament to this is an experience shared by Kiiru Muhoya, founder of Kenyan fintech startup Fingo Africa with TechCrunch, on how the platform helped him raise a $250,000 pre-seed round.
He said that after going through Pariti’s assessment ahead of a planned fundraiser, he realized that the market he was targeting was too small. Also, he needed to learn more about what VCs were looking for to be successful.
Muhoya decided to switch to being at the other end of things. Joining the expert platform on Pariti, he began to review companies and provided feedback to other founders. This led him to take some months off to pivot his business based on Pariti’s first feedback and what he had learned from the expert platform. He took his startup through another assessment on the platform and thus closed the round.
The company has made significant strides since launching in 2019. It has over 500 companies across 42 countries, 100 freelance experts and 60 investors using its platform. Berhane also adds that five funds currently use Pariti’s operating system for their deal management.
“For us, I think we’re building the rails for how ventures are built and scaled in emerging markets. We have partners in place across emerging markets, including Latin America and India. We also have a strong interest in the United States, where we see a real need for our platform,” Berhane said.
It charges a subscription model for investors, but Berhane wouldn’t disclose the numbers. He says that Pariti will begin to charge a subscription fee for founders as well. Another revenue stream comes when investors or founders pay a certain transaction fee when using Pariti’s freelance experts for projects. The same happens when there’s any fundraise executed from the platform.
Talking about fundraising, the company recently secured an undisclosed pre-seed capital from angels and VCs like 500 Startups, Kepple Africa and Huddle VC.
But it hasn’t been smooth sailing for Pariti, as one issue that has stood out in dealing with founders and investors is trust. Berhane says founders have shared some horror stories about engaging with investors, while investors have shared trust concerns about founders reporting false numbers.
Pariti tries to address this by providing NDAs for both parties where the company will not share founders’ data with investors until they want it to be shared. And investors won’t get deals that Pariti hasn’t thoroughly vetted.
Both founders are of East African descent — Berhane from Eritrea and Ayele from Ethiopia — and crossed paths a couple of times but took different routes to be where they are now.
Wossen Ayele (COO) and Yacob Berhane (CEO). Image Credits: Khadija M Farah & Rebecca Ume Crook
Ayele started his career at a consulting shop with offices across East Africa before moving back to the U.S. for law school. There, he got his first exposure to the early-stage startup world and worked with an emerging markets-focused VC fund.
“I could see how technology and innovation could play a role in helping communities — whether it’s through financial inclusion, access to essential goods and services, connecting people at the base of the pyramid to markets,” he said.
Upon graduation and completion of his legal training, Ayele headed back to Nairobi to get involved with its growing African startup ecosystem, where he and Berhane founded the company.
The CEO who studied finance and investment banking in the U.S. moved back to Africa to start a pan-African accelerator in Johannesburg, South Africa. While he has worked in managerial positions for companies like the African Leadership University and Ajua, Berhane spent most of his time brokering deals for them, which ultimately led him to start Pariti.
“After helping businesses raise more than $20 million and seeing how that money led to job creation and upward mobility for employees, I knew there was a path I could have that would be meaningful within finance. I continued to think about the growing asymmetry of access to capital, talent and knowledge in the startup ecosystem and the lack of infrastructure addressing it. Pariti was how we wanted to solve it,” Berhane said.
Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion.
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This pan-African freelance platform is the first Zimbabwean startup backed by Techstars
On the 25th of January, Techstars Seattle announced its 12th class, featuring 10 startups from different parts of the world. The accelerator, which has accepted only a handful of African startups, included one from Zimbabwe in this class.
AfriBlocks is a global pan-African marketplace of vetted African freelance professionals. The startup was founded by Tongayi Choto and Roger Roman in July 2020 and has offices in Harare and Los Angeles.
The company is trying to address the high unemployment rate that plagues many African countries by making it easier for people to find work. Quite a number of international and local freelance websites exist to meet these needs. Still, according to CEO Choto, most of them offer too many options with no adequate vetting process.
“It can be very hard to find African freelancers. If a customer is lucky enough to get past those hurdles and find a freelancer to work with, they often don’t have the proper collaboration tools to complete the project in a precise and timely manner,” he told TechCrunch.
In a global freelance market worth more than $800 billion, AfriBlocks says it is doing this different by equipping African freelancers with intuitive collaboration tools and a secure payment system that makes it easy to get remote contract projects completed.
When a job is posted on its platform, the company claims that they save the customer the trouble of perusing thousands of freelancers profiles and portfolios. Instead, they use automation tools to match three freelancers who fit the user’s qualifications.
Also, AfriBlocks assigns to the selected freelancer a project manager who manages the project through completion. Once the job is complete, AfriBlocks collects a transaction fee, and the payment is released from escrow. This ensures that expectations are clear and deadlines are met for freelancers and customers.
In addition, Choto says the company offers community and development resources that help them upskill and remain competitive in the global marketplace. This has been done in partnership with edtech company Coursera and African nonprofit Ingressive for Good. It is also in talks with online learning platform Datacamp to do the same for data scientists.
Roger Roman (co-founder). Image Cedits: AfriBlocks
As peculiar to most African startups, funding has been hard to come by for the team. Bootstrapping seemed like the only course of action to take, and it seems to have taken them far. In less than a year, the company has onboarded more than 2,000 freelancers and more than 400 buyers. It has also completed up to 250 jobs generating over $60,000 in revenue. This progress has attracted the likes of Techstars and Google to provide them with funding and networking.
“We’ve encountered the problems that many Black founders face, such as scarce fundraising sources. However, organizations like Techstars Seattle, Transparent Collective and Google for Startups have helped us by providing mentorship, networking opportunities and investor demo days showcases,” Roman said.
AfriBlocks joins African startups like Farmcrowdy, OnePipe, Risevest, Eversend and OjaExpress, who have participated in different Techstars accelerators worldwide.
Before AfriBlocks, Choto, who grew up in Zimbabwe, served as a product manager at BillMari, a pan-African remittance service leveraging bitcoin technology. For Roger, whose upbringing was on the west side of Chicago, he doubles as an active angel investor and a VC scout.
It is predicted that freelancers will account for as much as 80% of the entire workforce worldwide by 2030. Freelance work has become a viable source of employment and has shifted from being a vocation people engage in to supplement their income to being a full-time source of jobs for Africans.
The long-term goal for AfriBlocks is to build the tech infrastructure for the future of work in Africa. According to the company, participating in Techstars is the right path to that destination.
“In anticipation of the impending global human talent shortage that could result in 85 million jobs being unfilled and the loss of $85 trillion annually, our long-term goal is to make Africa the global hub for technical and creative freelancers by providing the rails for companies to work in Africa and with remote African talent,” Choto said.
Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion.
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