Qualifi, an Indianapolis-based tech startup that helps its customers screen job candidates more quickly, has landed $2.5 million in seed financing to support the company’s growth.
The investment was led by Menlo Park, California-based Rally Ventures, with participation from both existing and new investors.
Repeat investors are Boulder, Colorado-based Techstars; Indianapolis-based Sixty8 Capital and Elevate Ventures; Brooklyn, New York-based Debut Capital and the Bloomington-based Flywheel Fund.
New investors include the Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based Northwestern Mutual Black Founder Accelerator powered by Gener8tor; Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Converge; Colorado-based Service Provider Capital; and multiple angel investors.
“We’re in the right space at the right time, and our investors saw the opportunity and wanted to stay in,” said Qualifi cofounder and CEO Darrian Mikell.
The company currently has 13 employees, with a 14th expected to start work on March 1. It operates entirely remotely—about two-thirds of its employees live in Indiana.
Mikell said the company hopes to double its staff over the next 12 months.
Qualifi’s offerings are especially timely now because the job market is so tight. The company’s software platform is designed to help its clients quickly conduct screening interviews by phone with multiple job candidates. The job candidates respond to pre-recorded questions and the information is then transcribed and relayed to the hiring company. This allows the company to vet candidates much more quickly than it could through person-to-person phone calls.
Mikell said the technology also standardizes the screening process, which can reduce the unconscious human bias that can affect hiring decisions. And since the screening interviews are audio-only, they provide no visual cues about an applicant’s race or age. “Every candidate is going to get the same interview experience,” Mikell said.
Qualifi’s customers span a variety of industries, including health care, logistics, construction, call centers and hospitality. The company’s typical customer is a company that operates in a high-turnover industry and hires a lot of hourly employees, Mikell said. He declined to say how many customers the company has, but Qualify says that, in 2021 alone, its customers used its platform to qualify tens of thousands of job candidates.
This is the second publicly announced funding round for Qualifi, which launched in 2019. The company landed $600,000 in pre-seed funding in May of last year.
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