HR Tech company HiPeople secures $3 million in seed funding led by Moonfire Ventures

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Jakob Gillmann
HR Tech company HiPeople secures $3 million in seed funding led by Moonfire Ventures

Berlin-based HR tech company HiPeople today announced it has raised a $3m seed round from ex-Atomico co-founder Mattias Ljungman’s new fund Moonfire Ventures, Capnamic Ventures, and Cherry Ventures.

HiPeople automates candidate reference checks, and supports recruiters with in-depth talent insights to hire remotely. Using HiPeople, recruiters can automate candidate reference checks from request, to collection, and analysis. This allows them to go beyond the CV with better, verified information on every candidate, and save plenty of time in the process.

The company started operations in late 2019, and launched its first product during the Covid outbreak in early 2020.

The founders saw that CVs were a weak link in the recruitment chain: “CVs are surprisingly limited, and provide few insights on the candidate. Reference checks allow you to dive deeper into the candidate’s past performance and experience, and make it easy to understand whether she fits the job you are trying to fill. On top of that, they allow you to verify whether the shiny CV is really so shiny.” said HiPeople co-founder Jakob Gillmann.

“2020 had an enormous effect on how companies hire and the role technology plays” said HiPeople co-founder Sebastian Schüller. “Tomorrow’s way of hiring became today’s reality,” he added.

Between 2017 and 2019 SaaS spending on HR tech ​has jumped by 700% globally, with companies like Greenhouse and Peakon building technology that delivers greater efficiency and better decisions.

“Workflow automation of repetitive processes, and insights on the candidate that go beyond the limitations of the CV, are a clear pain for anybody in recruiting.” said Mattias Ljungman. “The Covid-influenced reality of remote work, hence remote hiring practices, has increased the complexity of finding the right talent. HiPeople created a way to enable anybody who is hiring to make better decisions, whilst improving processes and increasing hiring velocity.”

HiPeople is growing fast and has already won a raft of customers - including Kleiner Perkins’s Prisma, fintech SumUp, content management system GraphCMS, and data mining unicorn Celonis. “This is only the beginning,” said Sebastian Schüller. “We are working on new AI-driven features that will drastically increase the product's intelligence.” Today, the platform is already able to ‘read between the lines’ of the reference’s responses, and dynamically dig deeper with HiPeople’s Intelligent Follow-up Questions. Its partnerships and integrations with established HR tech like Greenhouse make it easy to include it into the existing tech stack.

Founders
HiPeople was founded by Jakob Gillmann and Sebastian Schüller. Jakob, who previously worked for HR-tech Peakon and SF-based Optimizely, recently left Berlin-based SaaS-player Adjust to build HiPeople. Sebastian previously ran the Berlin office of the early-stage VC Capnamic Ventures, where he invested in and supported Seed/Series A stage SaaS companies. Before that he worked at Google in Dublin as a Growth Strategist. Jakob and Sebastian first met in 2011 during their first tech internship at Spotify competitor Simfy. The HiPeople team is located around Europe but primarily in Berlin and Dublin.

Celonis Case Study
Celonis has doubled its workforce in the last 12 months to 1.200 employees globally. The firm uses HiPeople to ensure high hiring quality for any role they close from San Francisco, to Munich and Tokyo. By programmatically conducting reference checks the company hires talent based on verified insights on topics like areas of improvement, skills, teamwork style, or work values.

Kevin Blair, Celonis’ Global VP of Talent Acquisition, said: “We utilise HiPeople as a critical component to execute hiring future talent at Celonis. Every new Celonaut is reviewed by former colleagues using HiPeople, it is now considered a valuable and essential part of our recruiting process”.

About HiPeople
HiPeople's platform creates in-depth talent insights to make hiring easy for everyone. It does so by automating candidate reference checks from request, to collection, and analysis. The HR tech company is funded by Moonfire Ventures, Capnamic Ventures, Cherry Ventures, and Tiny VC. The HiPeople team is located around Europe but primarily in Berlin and Dublin.