SAN FRANCISCO — Canvas, the world’s first Diversity Recruitment Platform™, announced today a Series C round of $50 million led by Owl Ventures, with participation from Sequoia, Lachy Groom, Zoom Apps Fund, HighSage Ventures, BAM Elevate and Fifth Down Capital. Coupled with the Series C is the launch of a new product, Canvas Diversity Analytics & Benchmarking ™, which will set the industry standard for increasing diversity in Corporate America.
Already adopted by prominent companies including Airbnb, Bloomberg, Lyft, Pinterest, Roblox, and more, Canvas offers a differentiated approach for understanding, benchmarking and evolving diversity in the workplace through access to the largest ever pool of self-reported candidate diversity data.
Valued at $400M, Canvas is trailblazing a new industry category in recruiting that helps companies take action on their diversity goals by utilizing candidates’ self-reported data to identify talent, rather than inferred data that might be inaccurate or illegal.
“The biggest problem in recruiting right now isn’t talent or opportunity, it’s data,” said Ben Herman, CEO of Canvas. “Every company may have good intentions to spearhead diversity initiatives, but research shows that most diversity programs aren’t increasing diversity. We want to change that for businesses by improving accessibility to the best underrepresented talent with insights based on self reported data – while creating systems of accountability that actually move the needle.”
Diversity and inclusion has remained a front-and-center theme in the workforce. And now, for the first time in over 30 years, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission modified its disclosure rules, requiring that public companies provide a far greater window into their human capital management than ever before. Previously, organizations only had to disclose their number of employees. Today, they must divulge human capital metrics considered to be material to an understanding of the company’s business, including diversity and inclusion.
“Canvas is providing best-in-class recruiting tools that will revolutionize the way companies hire exceptional and diverse talent. We believe self-reported data is the new gold standard in modern day recruitment and Canvas is poised to take the lead in this category. We are incredibly impressed with the passion and dedication of the Canvas management team and cannot wait to support them as they become the industry standard for diversity recruiting in the US and around the world,” said Jenny Wang, Investor at Owl Ventures.
Canvas’ new Diversity Analytics & Benchmarking product provides companies with detailed data insights and diversity benchmarks, so hiring teams can uncover diversity disparities, identify biases and track progress in real time. Additionally, the product allows companies to get visibility into their own diversity hiring metrics relative to companies of similar industries and sizes. Recruiters can now view at-a-glance how their top-of-funnel compares, grouped by ethnicity or gender from the analytics dashboard, and spot and prioritize equity efforts more confidently to achieve diversity hiring goals.
With 3x revenue growth YOY, Canvas plans to use the Series C proceeds to expand its product into other industries and verticals outside of technology, and address later stages of people’s careers. The company will also make new R&D investments to further develop the Canvas platform’s insights and recommendation systems.
About Canvas
Canvas is the #1 Diversity Recruitment Platform (DRP). It’s the new way to hire diverse teams with confidence and gain full transparency into the diversity of applicants in your hiring process. Companies like Lyft, Headspace, Airbnb & Dropbox use Canvas to understand the diversity of their recruiting pipeline, source underrepresented talent, run engaging virtual events, enhance employer brand, and measure the ROI of their diversity recruiting initiatives.
