HR focused startup PiQube secures $500K funding from The HR Fund

Wednesday April 29, 2015 , 3 min Read

Chennai-based HR startup PiQube has raised $500K from The HR Fund (The Fund). Following the round, HR Fund will join the company’s board. PiQube will use investment primarily for expanding its technology and sales team along with aggressive geographic expansion – both within India and the South East Asia.

The HR Fund (the company, the Fund) is India’s first human resources (HR) focused private investment company with a vision to institutionalize HR entrepreneurship.

PiQube, which was launched during TechSparks 2014, is a hiring intelligence tool that mimics a recruiter’s brain through use of analytics and machine learning. An application that intelligently searches the entire internet for profiles matching the client requirement.

The brainchild of Jayadev Mahalingam, PiQube’s intelligent algorithms understands various aspects that humans derive from every profile. PiQube has executed seven pilots till date with large IT firms and a large bank in Singapore. Currently, the company has two paying clients and it’s working on a Walkin product – which will enable companies to interview only the right candidates instead of everyone walking in.

Speaking about funding, Jayadev, Founder & CEO, PiQube said,

The HR Fund with its deep expertise in the HR domain will help PiQube refine its product from a functional perspective. The investment will not only help us scale up and grow rapidly, but we are confident that we will become the new benchmark for recruitment processes going forward. We are excited to have The HR Fund as partners and look forward to growing the business together.

The backstory

Running ‘The Drone Network’, a recruitment firm for almost five years with 28 recruitment consultants, Jayadev used to go through the problem of quality match making daily. Matching candidates to pair with the job descriptions companies usually provide isn’t that easy considering the various roles that have evolved in the recent years. These processes are getting tougher day by day.

Most HR consultants today are in a dilemma whether their efforts would culminate into a closure. Jayadev and his team weren’t quite satisfied with their efforts and this made the team pivot their model. They started PiQube, an easy to use recruiting tool for effectively matching candidates across the web.

According to Utkarsh Joshi, Principal, The HR Fund, “We are keenly interested in looking at the recruitment sector as we believe it is ripe for innovation. Over the years, a large chunk of processes in this segment have remained manual, leading to inefficiencies and high recruitment costs. PiQube has the technology and the team to provide new dimensions to how new-age recruitment processes should work.”