Behind Kula's $12M Seed Funding

Extremely thrilled to announce that we have raised $12 million in our Seed round of funding!

We welcome our latest partners - Sequoia and SquarePeg. We also thank our existing investors - Venture Highway and Together Fund for continuing the trust and doubling down on their investment. Fills us with gratitude, confidence, and the gusto to step into the next phase.

You can read more about the official news on TechCrunch, Tech in Asia, and Forbes.

In the 13 months of existence of Kula - we have raised $15M in capital (in our pre-seed and seed round, coming within 6 months), became a team of 12 spread across 2 countries, served a handful of alpha customers, and built a waitlist of over 1200 brands. We are extremely proud of what we have achieved and we are excited about what the future holds in store.

What does Kula do?

Almost all the business functions have massively evolved in the past decade or two, most of them enabled by cutting-edge technologies and tools. Martech has 8000+ tools, Salestech is catching up soon, so is finance, ITSM, and every other function. Except for recruitment. Recruitment tech is still stuck in the 90s, while we are hiring in 2022.

We want to end this dichotomy.

We are automating outbound recruitment and making referrals effortless. That means, sourcing passive candidates from places like LinkedIn, Github, and employee networks, building a talent pool of such candidates, and then automating all communications across multiple channels (emails, InMails, LinkedIn connection requests).

With analytics built on top, you can also forecast and measure your talent pipeline much more accurately than before.

It also creates an exclusive, internal pool of existing employees' first-degree connections called Circles. Recruiters can then find the best candidates from these circles and ask for introductions, proactively. Or employees can refer a candidate to a recruiter in just a click.

Try it out for yourself, if you'd like to!

Our alpha customers

We have had phenomenal support from our customers from the early days. The genesis of Kula is heavily influenced by the insights driven from the customer conversations I had. We onboarded a few brands across all sizes as alpha customers and co-created Kula along with them. The past few months have been about building, collecting feedback, and building more.

While our alpha cohort saw unprecedented results - closing roles 80% faster than before, and an increased recruiter yield of more than 50%, we have gained more by their patience, candour, and enriching feedback.

Thank you. Each one of our alpha cohort members. You are a part of this, as much as every team member of Kula is.

Reflecting on the past year

When we’re at the pre-seed stage, we had a strong hypothesis and an ambitious product roadmap. In the last 6 months, we have added more channels, better personalization, dozens of new templates, almost a new UI, and the top-of-shelf compliance.

Here’s a few milestones that stand out in the last 6 months:

1. Adding LinkedIn as a channel – We now automate candidate engagement on LinkedIn as well, with the same agility and robustness as email. You can schedule your InMails and connection requests to candidates, saving you hours of manual work and task management hassles.
2. Task Centers – While enhancement of recruiter productivity was always a priority, our platform now puts that in focus as well. The task center is like your recruiter-productivity task-inbox. This is where they begin their day of recruitment.
3. Global Search – We also built global search for your entire workspace. No matter where you are in your workflow, click on the search button and search for anything you want to refer - 
4. Integrations with Greenhouse and Lever – We appreciate the importance of ATSs in the recruitment-stack and play well with them. We now have deep integrations with the 2 most-used ATSs. We are also listed in their app directories.
5. SOC 2 Type 2 – We always have put security as our strategic priority, and our Soc 2 Type 2 certification is one of the feathers in our hat. We would make sure you never have to think twice before using Kula.
6. And a lot more – One of our core operating principles is - move fast and reflect. That ensures a fast shipping culture within Kula. 

What’s next?

We have built a product that we’re proud of. We have had incredible early trust and support of our customers and the recruiter community at large. It’s time for switching gears and moving fast.

1. Make a large splash – We believe that recruiters have been short-changed for long, especially when it came to tools that make their life easier. They deserve better, and we will make every effort to make them know that we exist and we are here for them.
2. Expand our team – Kula exists to make recruitment effortless. Our vision needs the brightest minds to come together and work to make it a reality, and the funds will help us build a company that fosters such talent, and encourage them to achieve their potential. (We’re hiring across Singapore, India, and US)‍
3. Expand our platform – We aim to fill all the gaps in the recruitment workflow, and remove all efficiencies in the stack. To achieve this, we need to rapidly expand the features of our platform, as well as work seamlessly with the key members of the recruitment stack. That is going to be the directive principle of our product roadmap.

Taking Kula to every recruiter out there

You can (and should) call me biased but I think using Kula just makes sense. I have been in the recruiter seat for long enough, and have waited for someone to build something like Kula to solve my everyday challenges.

And it’s pretty easy to use as well. It works with your existing stack - ATS, LinkedIn, GitHub, Gmail. The set up doesn’t need any development bandwidth, and the ROI is achieved in the very first hire.

Thank you

Our hearts are filled with gratitude. Thank you for believing in us and the world we envision for recruiters across the globe. It has been such an exhilarating experience building Kula with some of the best team mates, investors, and customers one could ask for. Thank you.

P.S. - If you believe in our mission, and the world we envision, please spread the word on LinkedIn and Twitter or tell your friends who are facing the same hiring challenges. We’re all ears, drop us a line at achu at kula dot ai.

To easy recruiting,

Achu

Co-founder and CEO, Kula