Blog

Recruitment automation platform Kula announced that it raised $12 million in a seed round co-led by Sequoia Capital India and Square Peg Capital. Existing investors Venture Highwayand Together Fund, and a handful of prominent angels also participated in the round.

This fundraise comes within six months of its pre-seed announcement, taking the total funding amount to $15 million before the release of its product. Kula said it plans to use the fresh funds to further its mission beginning with an expansion of research and development, product and go-to-market teams across the U.S., Singapore, and India. These funds will also help accelerate its global customer footprint, it noted.

“We are seeing a tectonic shift as organisations across the spectrum are switching to outbound hiring processes as default. Achuthanand and team have unique insights in outbound recruitment gathered from their own past experiences, and they are leveraging it to build a platform that replaces ad-hoc hiring processes with an automation stack,” Aakash Kapoor, VP, Sequoia Southeast Asia, said in a media release.

Founded in 2021, Kula provides a sleek and intuitive Software as a Service (SaaS) platform for recruiters and founders to automate continual engagement with top candidates.

It integrates with all the tools recruiters interface within their workday, including LinkedIn, GitHub, Gmail, and the Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Automating outreach campaigns can save recruiters from spending endless hours on the most repetitive tasks in the hiring process.

“Recruitment is an absolute priority for companies across the spectrum of size, industry, and geography, and is still an underserved business function. Kula’s founding team brings an unmatched combination of substantial recruiting experience and distinguishing engineering talent,” Piruze Sabuncu, Partner at Square Peg Capital, said in a media release.

The founding team at Kula comprises co-founders Achuthanand Ravi (ex-Stripe, Uber and Freshworks recruiter), Sathappan (engineer number 3 at Freshworks, and later an engineering leader at Grab), and Suman Kumar Dey (an early member of the Infra team at Freshworks and Grab, and Architect at Salesforce).

“Almost all business functions have reinvented themselves in the past decade, except for recruiting. CEOs openly term recruitment as their competitive priority and yet the recruiters are functioning in 2022 with the tools of the 1990s,” Achuthanand Ravi, Co-founder and CEO at Kula, said in a media release.

Kula said one its products ‘Circle’ brings all employee networks to one place, allowing recruiters to identify their next hire from first-degree connections of all employees and get an intro with a click of a button. It takes the reactive approach to referrals and makes it proactive – easier for recruiters to take action, eliminating the incessant cycle of follow-ups, the firm added.