SAN FRANCISCO – Kula, the world’s first recruitment automation platform built to enable hyper-growth companies to build massive talent pipelines on autopilot, today announced $2.7 million funding from Venture Highway, Together Fund, and Global Founders Capital.
The genesis of Kula happened when Achuthanand, co-founder and CEO of Kula, was working at Stripe, as a part of their leadership recruitment team. He observed that while all other business functions have undergone transformational changes facilitated by technology, the recruitment teams, even at the companies that are beacons of tech innovation, use outdated recruitment systems that hinder quality talent acquisition at scale. In the initial customer research stage, the entire recruitment community overwhelmingly resonated with the sentiment of being paralyzed by multiple siloed spreadsheets, lack of visibility, and inundating busy work.
“Almost all business functions have reinvented themselves in the past decade, except for recruiting. CEOs openly term recruitment as their competitive priority and yet the recruiters are functioning in 2022 with the tools of the 1990s,” said Achuthanand Ravi, Co-founder & CEO at Kula. “We understand the challenges of a recruiter through first-hand experience. We want to empower them to do their best work, close more candidates, and focus on the future,” added Achuthanand.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Kula’s founding team comprises co-founders Sathappan, engineer number 3 at Freshworks, and later an engineering leader at Grab, and Suman Kumar Dey, an early member of the Infra team at Freshworks and Grab, and Architect at Salesforce.
“Kula is building a solution that is desperately needed in today’s ultra-competitive talent market. The team combines a deep understanding of recruiting with the latest product and engineering standards – resulting in an intuitive and super-efficient solution that users love,” said Roel Janssen, Partner at Global Founders Capital.
Kula is a recruitment automation platform that widens the talent pool by unifying all candidate sources and automating the candidate outreach and engagement. The recruiters can then reach out to the best-fit talent through automated nudges via multiple channels and touchpoints. Kula makes it effortlessly simple and fast for employees to refer new talent to their organizations while offering their leadership teams a predictable and reliable view of their talent pipeline at all times.
“The hiring process continues to be frustrating, despite the tools/solutions around, and I have faced this as a founder. From consolidating top of the funnel, reaching out to networks, working the references, etc, the workflow consumes more energy than the final act of hiring itself. Kula’s founding team brings a brilliant combination of solid recruiting experience and engineering talent – giving them the ability to reimagine this on a first-principles basis, even wearing the hat of a customer,” said Priya Mohan, Partner at Venture Highway.
The team has been building the platform with a few design partners, handpicked to highlight the challenges from early-stage to mature organizations. The design partners feature notable global hyper-growth organizations including the likes of GoJek, OpenGovernmentProducts SG, and Wise.
“The talent market is at its competitive best right now. Hiring great talent is not just how you grow, but exist. The founding team of Kula has just the ingredients to solve the recruitment puzzle for companies at all stages of growth. Together Fund is excited to back them, and help them scale,” said Girish Mathrubootham, CEO & Founder, Freshworks and General Partner at Together Fund.
