Expertia AI, a deeptech virtual recruitment platform has raised $1.2 million in seed funding led by Chiratae Ventures and Endiya Partners with participation from Entrepreneur First and angel investor Archana Priyadarshini.
UK-based talent investor Entrepreneur First has doubled down on their previous pre-seed funding into the start-up last March. The funds will be utilised by the company for assembling a team of AI researchers and software engineers, and creating a brand and product awareness in the Indian market.
The company was founded in 2021 by Akshay Gugnani, Research Scholar from IBM and MIT, and entrepreneur Kanishk Shukla, who successfully exited Koovs.com post its listing on AIM/LSE.
Expertia AI offers a one-click hiring solution to SMEs that helps them automatically source and identifies the top ten candidates from a pool of applicants invited from 25-plus job boards. It currently has over 500 companies, 1,000 recruiters, and over one lakh professionals actively using the platform.
‘Serving global customers’
Kanishk Shukla, Co-founder and CEO, said, “Our vision is to become a global skill cloud offering real-time hiring as a service to businesses worldwide. Our first solution tailored for the SMEs is an AI-powered virtual recruiter which uses proprietary algorithms, metadata and platform integrations to organically source and deliver top 10 job applicants within a few hours.”
Shukla added, “The larger businesses however could access this intelligence as a service by integrating their ATS with Expertia AI and receive real-time fit — not fit recommendations for incoming job applications, and alerts notifying them of qualified passive candidates in their historical pool of applicants. We have published research and secured patents for our work in skill extraction and validation, skill graph generation, and career path recommendation.”
Akshay Gugnani, Co-founder and CTO, said, “We are targeting 100 job board integrations in FY23 up from 25 currently and improve the accuracy of our top talent recommendation up from 75 per cent to 85 per cent by the end of the year. We will also focus on acquiring and employing publicly available metadata at scale to help us go beyond what is written in a job description and resume, understand business needs and hiring preferences, and offer curated candidates for higher conversion and retention.”
Hiring and retaining talent
Expertia AI operates a freemium model, offering unlimited sourcing and screening of candidates to start-ups for free with premium opt-in features for larger organisations under paid subscriptions.
“The future of work will be defined by how companies hire and retain talent in the post-pandemic world. We see Expertia AI bringing an AI-powered platform to the world, delivering the best match between candidates and opportunities through automated extraction and matching of skills, and we are excited to partner with them,” said Sudhir Sethi, Chairman and Founder, Chiratae Ventures.
Sateesh Andra of Endiya Partners, said, “There is an urgent need for companies to hire better candidates sooner. Expertia AI-enabled ATS platform helps attract quality employees in less time. Kanishk and Akshay bring together a good mix of tech/AI and business/domain expertise to make this happen. Endiya is excited to partner with them in building this new-age recruitment and skill platform.”
Later in the year, the company is planning to offer skill advisory solutions to business employees helping companies reskill, upskill, and retain professionals.
Published on
April 18, 2022
