EdGE Networks raises Series A funding from Kalaari Capital and Ventureast

EdGE Networks, an AI-driven HR tech solutions company, today announced that it has secured $4.5 million in Series A funding led by Kalaari Capital with participation from Ventureast.

The company stated that it plans to use the capital to strengthen its core product offerings for workforce optimisation and talent acquisition. EdGE Networks is also looking to grow geographically and vertically expand their offerings.

In an e-mail interaction with YourStory, EdGE Networks stated that they are planning to grow their operations in the US and UK regions, as well as expand across the IT, ITES, and BFSI sectors. The company also plans to expand their 70-member team by 25 percent.

Started in 2012, EdGE Networks harnesses artificial intelligence (AI) and data science to solve the talent acquisition and workforce optimisation challenges for large and mid-sized organisations, thereby lowering operating cost and delivering inefficiencies.

Speaking on the fundraise, Arjun Pratap, Founder and CEO of EdGE Networks, said,

“We are delighted to partner with our new investors whose collective track-record and experience of building companies will be invaluable as we work together to build a best-in-class HR technology company to transform workforce. This funding will allow us to strengthen our technology, expand our team, and move forward to realise our global ambitions.”

The company’s HR automation platform HireAlchemy (under its parent brand EdGE Networks) is an active part of the recruitment process for five multinationals firms in India, including names like Wipro, HCL, Microland, etc.

According to EdGE Networks, the company has a multi-prolonged revenue approach, which includes direct sales of their solutions to large entreprises and their SaaS talent acquisition suite to small and medium sized businesses. They also have a channel as well as an alliance strategy, which allows them to bundle their services with partners or provide their solution through HR service providers like RPO, Job boards, among others.

Sumit Jain, Partner at Kalaari Capital, said,

“AI-driven solutions are fast taking main-stage in solving real problems faced by enterprises and opening up opportunities for step changes in business processes and cost innovations. EdGE Networks is at the forefront of AI-led HR innovation and we are excited to partner with them in their journey. Arjun and his team bring a rare combination of technology excellence, business innovation and enterprise experience, and we wish them great success in the years to come.”

While, Siddhartha Das, General Partner at Ventureast, added,

“Workforce optimisation and right talent acquisition are critical for success in an increasingly tech-driven environment. The team at EdGE is building an AI-driven solution to address the future challenges in HR management. We are happy to become a part of their growth and success story through this investment.”

Making the money

When last interacting with YourStory in April 2015, the founder of EdGE Networks stated that their internal resource management tool contributed 85-90 percent to their revenue.

Explaining the process, the founder said that in normal scenario, IT businesses lose a major chunk of their costs to benched employees, while being unable to allocate a resource for a requirement in due time. On an average, it takes close to 15-16 days for multinationals to allocate a resource internally, hence losing out almost $800,000-1.5 million to their customers every day.

Their HireAlchemy platform reads an employee’s structured data, including certification, roles and skill training information, as well as unstructured data, including work experience summary, targets achieved and appraisal summaries, to find the right match for a requirement internally.

In April last year, the firm said that it charges its customers based on the number of profiles and job descriptions scanned.

At that time, the platform was scanning 40,000-50,000 job descriptions, followed by 1,500-2,000 profiles monthly. While internally this number multiplies to 20,000 job descriptions and 150,000 profile scans for internal resource allocation.

Until now, the company claims to have scanned 3.9 million job descriptions as well as 22 million profiles, since its inception.