The capital, which brings total funding raised by the startup to $6.2 million, will enable it to serve more brands.
For diverse brands in particular, there are a lot of economic hurdles that these groups face, which makes it even harder for them to access capital.
Its other offering is a labor marketplace for brands not in a position to hire full-time teams but require talent occasionally.
Its community of brands recommends the talent or manufacturer, who are listed on the marketplace after several stages of vetting.
Brands gain access to the labor marketplace, capital and other resources, upon signing up (at a cost) on the startup’s main product, the B2B marketplace and SaaS product.
Companies that offer role referral bonuses do so with the assumption that their employees know their work culture — and a role’s requirements — best.
But what if companies were to open up those referral bonuses to people outside the organization?
Draftboard lets employers post referral bonuses and have referrers compete to earn them by scouring their networks for talent.
Free for companies, Draftboard notifies its roughly 1,000 referrers — in Draftboard’s parlance, “scouts” — as referrals move through the different stages of companies’ recruiting processes.
Referrers are graded on the quality of their referrals, and Draftboard takes a 20% cut of each referral bonus.
The startup charges a listing fee (subscription fee) to publish jobs on the platform and a success fee when a hire is made.
“The listing fee ensures buy-in from startups to the two-way marketplace and a commitment to the recruiters they’re working with,” Kim said.
In addition to early- and late-stage startups, Kim said the platform also works with larger in-house talent teams to fill challenging roles.
“More than 50% of our customers have great in-house talent teams, but they continue to post roles on Paraform.
“We’re already branching out into research, science, manufacturing and defense roles due to the demand we’re seeing from potential customers,” Kim said.
Just last year, Klaviyo went public, adding to the parade of startup success stories.
But they all showed what’s possible for the many people who dream of building a successful business in the Boston area.
When you put it all together, Lyman says, you get some of the primary building blocks for a successful startup ecosystem.
And what Boston may lack in nightlife, it surely makes up for in brain power and long history of startup success.
As Seseri says, success begets success.
Interview Kickstart, a profitable startup helping tech professionals acquire career-advancing skills, has raised $10 million in its maiden funding from Blume Ventures, the companies said on Monday.
The startup avoided raising venture money in the past because Valles said Interview Kickstart has always been profitable and focused on sustainable unit-economics.
Interview Kickstart is finally raising external capital because it plans to focus on two to three new areas aggressively.
For Blume Ventures, the investment in Interview Kickstart is its largest opening check in its decade-old history.
“Interview Kickstart presented a unique opportunity,” said Karthik Reddy, Managing Partner of Blume Ventures, in a statement.
Generative AI has done an impressive job in improving productivity in a wide range of areas, including website building.
10web, a company based out of Armenia, is entering the race and believes it has an edge.
10web allows users to quickly generate websites built with WordPress, the widely-used content management system that is notoriously hard to use for beginners, using text prompts.
WordPress still powers around 40% of all the websites on the internet, thanks to its customization options, according to estimates by w3techs.
“We have AI talent, which is probably four times cheaper in Armenia than in the U.S. And here, we can access the best AI talent possible,” the founder suggested.
Golden Ventures, a Canada-based venture capital firm, closed on over $100 million in capital commitments for its fifth fund targeting high-potential, seed-stage founders working across technologies, including AI, climate, blockchain and quantum.
“This is a continuation of our core thesis and created to be super founder-aligned,” Golden told TechCrunch.
The firm makes both core investments and those that lean more on the angel side.
Over 13 years, Golden Ventures has backed over 100 companies at the seed stage.
Golden Ventures V is backed by a group of existing institutional limited partners, including BDC Capital, ECMC Group, Foundry, HarbourVest Partners, Kensington Capital Partners, Northleaf Capital Partners, RBC, Teralys Capital, University of Chicago and Vintage Investment Partners, and new institutional partner Deloitte Ventures.
The responses to his tweet are split between the two factions that have appeared within venture in recent years: those who support diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, and those who do not.
Wealthy power players like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have been very outspoken against the premise of DEI, with their thoughts shared and spread widely throughout the ecosystem.
“DEI must DIE.
DEI received a lot of support after the murder of George Floyd back in 2020, but support has waned these past few years.
In a sense, they were right, and the decreased DEI support in business and tech has created ripple effects.
While many major crypto companies have been layering off employees in recent months, startups are seizing the opportunity to scoop them up. This is because, as big players drop talent…
