HR organizations are facing a widening skills gap, economic constraints, and changing expectations around work. It is therefore not surprising that burnout and burnout are widespread in the HR sector, with a survey found that 42% of teams are struggling under the weight of too many projects and responsibilities.
Change starts with personnel and management, some might argue. Others who are more tech-savvy might see HR technology as a solution. While there is quite a bit of dissatisfaction with HR technology providers (at least according to Some data), to be fair, many companies see the real value of HR technology. According to a recent Sapient reportMore than half of businesses with more than 500 employees plan to increase HR technology spending by an average of 21% over the next year.
One beneficiary of that increased spending is London-based Beamery, a startup developing a talent lifecycle management platform. Beamery announced today that it has raised $50 million in a Series D round, valuing the company at $1 billion, bringing the company’s total raised to date to $228 million. .
Teachers Venture Growth (TVG), part of the Ontario Teachers Retirement Plan, led the round. TVG’s Avid Larizadeh Duggan said in an emailed statement: “I believe Beamery is well positioned to win as it provides a solution that you can rely on across different economic cycles. . “Beamery is helping the world’s biggest employers with this talent agility and enabling them to unleash the potential of their workforce.”
Undoubtedly, Beamery has gained impressive traction this year, scaling its customer base to “hundreds” of businesses and over 25,000 users. Revenue from Fortune 500 customers increased by more than 250% compared to June 2021, when Beamery close the door its Series C round, according to the company, while net retention increased to 135%.
“Beamery’s talent lifecycle management platform … gives organizations, such as General Motors, VMWare and Johnson & Johnson, the information they need to make the right decisions about their workforces. and support them through each stage of the talent lifecycle – from recruitment to talent migration and development to upskilling,” Beamery CEO Abakar Saidov told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The new funding will support continued investment in our platform and technology capabilities, and help build our global sales footprint.”
Beamery was founded in 2013 by Saidov and his brother, Sultan Saidov, along with Mike Paterson. The Saidov brothers said their vision of Beamery was rooted in their experience as children of immigrants, when they were aware of the structural challenges associated with work. Paterson was formerly an analyst at Morgan Stanley, while the Saidov brothers worked at Goldman Sachs – Abakar is a commodities trader and Sultan is a merger and acquisition analyst.
Founded as Seed Jobs, Beamery uses AI to identify potential job-matches for open roles. Like many platforms that match a candidate’s vacancy, Abakar Saidov says that Beamery ranks skills based on the industry the company is hiring for and the candidate’s related work experience.
“Uses of mother of pearl” [AI] in our talent lifecycle management platform to provide companies with the information they need to plan for business needs and gaps, understand the skills and capabilities they have, and gain successfully attract, retain, upskill and redeploy their workforce,” said Abakar Saidov. “[O]your model is not to replace people; instead, they provide relevant information for human decision makers to make better decisions.”
Image credits: beam
Due to increasing scrutiny of AI systems that recommend candidates, Abakar Saidov was quick to note that Beamery shows different factors, including skill, seniority, qualifications and industry, influence how to its proposals and to what extent. Beamery is one of several vendors that may be subject to a New York City regulation – the Automated Employment Decision Tool law, which goes into effect in January – that would ban employers from using the tools. hire AI unless a biased audit might indicate they won’t use it. distinguish.
Abakar Saidov said that Beamery recently completed a third-party audit of bias in its AI capabilities, which involved “rigorous testing” of the platform’s machine learning models. (Abakar Saidov did not proactively share a copy of the report with TechCrunch; we requested a copy.) The company also partnered with Parity AI, a startup run by AI activist and ethicist Liz O’Sullivan heads, to test the platform on an ongoing basis.
“In the Beamery platform itself… (i.e. in the application layer), our key differentiator is helping customers ensure their own compliance with a multitude of privacy standards,” said Abakar Saidov. and global personal data. “We achieve this primarily through a preference center, which allows candidates to control their consent, whether companies can contact them and how, and control how they give their consent. use AI against their profile.”
Of course, Beamery doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Competitors in the HR technology software space include 15 years, raised $52 million in July for its talent management solution. There are also gloatinga well-capitalized startup building an AI-powered internal job market. Eight mandarins is one of the most formidable, with a valuation of over $2 billion and backing from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, General Catalyst and Lightspeed.
Broadly speaking, venture capitalists have shown a willingness to put money into HR tech startups even as other segments underperform. According to one analysis from WorkTech, the first half of this year saw the second largest investment in work technology globally, growing to $9.4 billion, with $4.6 billion invested in Q2 alone.
Despite layoffs in the tech industry, job growth has remained steady despite economic difficulties, driving demand for HR technology — and resulting in the creation of new suppliers.
To continue to lead the way, since Series C, Beamery has doubled down on its analytics capabilities — introducing a dashboard designed to enable companies to better understand their workforces, said Abakar Saidov. them by aggregating skills data across different HR tools and systems. The platform also recently launched a portal for candidates, providing job recommendations and the skills they may need to develop to advance a career in their chosen industry. . And, as a natural result of its acquisition of in-house human resource sourcing platform Flux, Beamery launched Beamery Grow, which Abakar Saidov describes as a “talent market solution” to help employees get the right skills. new skills and connections from within their organization.
“We are prioritizing innovations that allow customers to quickly and easily leverage their talent data for things like flexible workforce planning, and ensure they have time information. real and in-depth understanding of current and future workforce allocations, the skills that exist within their organizations in relation to their business results, and their achievement of diverse goals, equality and inclusion,” said Abakar Saidov. “The capabilities a company will need in the next ten years are in many cases very different from today, and so HR technology solutions need to be able to help businesses build, buy, or borrow.” the skills they need to build the right workforce of the future. “
Beamery currently has 417 employees. When asked about the recruitment plan, Abakar Saidov said they are “in the process of development”.
