This is Ashutosh Garg, co-founder and CEO of Eightfold.ai pictured in their first temporary office space in Sunnyvale, CA where they rented a couple of cubicles. That was back in July 2016, at the time of their $6M seed round which Lightspeed led. Fast forward just four years to 2020… Eightfold announced today that they raised a $125 million round to fuel their growth as the leading talent intelligence platform for the enterprise with the goal of helping everyone have the right career.
Back in 2016, Ashu and his cofounder, Varun Kacholia, saw a massive opportunity to help people find fulfillment in their careers and thereby help society at large. Ashu previously led search personalization at Google and then co-founded and served as CTO of BloomReach, a leading e-commerce personalization platform. Varun led the video search team for Google and YouTube and then ran the Newsfeed optimization group at Facebook. In short, the AI dream team. In their experiences, Ashu and Varun saw people often not landing in the right jobs due to archaic hiring processes which are based on flawed human intuition — and biases. They believed that AI applied to all the data available about people, companies, roles, etc could fundamentally transform the process and match people and roles in a more accurate and scalable way. Ashu and Varun further believed that such a system could guide people as they evolved in their careers.
Four years into their journey, their vision has become reality. Eightfold offers a SaaS platform sold to enterprises that first aggregates information about candidates/employees from a broad array of enterprise sources such as HRM, ATS, ERP, and CRM and augments it with external sources and signals to create a system of record on talent. AI is then used to understand each person and also project what their career trajectory can be. Eightfold also uses AI to build an understanding of job roles and what it takes to succeed in each role, and then matches people to those jobs. Powered by this intelligence layer, Eightfold has developed a suite of integrated, AI-driven talent management applications including:
Talent Acquisition. Automatically identifies and qualified candidates using any source a company has such applicant tracking systems, inbound resumes, alumni lists, and resume books. Eightfold creates personalized outbound candidate nurturing/targeting campaigns.
Talent Experience. Traditional career sites are ineffective as candidates often apply for the wrong job or apply for every job. With Eightfold, candidates upload their resume, are instantly matched to the right jobs, and can apply with one click.
Talent Diversity. Eliminates bias by using NLP and AI to hide all evidence of certain personal characteristics so hiring managers cannot use age, gender, ethnicity, geography, or other biases to screen people.
Talent Mobility. With U.S. enterprises annually losing 25% of its white-collar workers, existing employees are a large untapped body of candidates. Eightfold creates a system of record of employee skills — nonexistent today — and then uses AI to match employees to jobs. It also uncovers which new skills and experiences an employee can gain for career advancement.
The adoption of the Eightfold platform has quickly taken off since the product was launched just two years ago. Large enterprises across multiple vertical industries and geographies have become substantial customers. Companies like Air Asia, Bayer, BNY Mellon, Booking.com, Congra, McKinsey & Co, Micron, NetApp, Vale, and Micron, and many more unannounced household-name corporations have adopted Eightfold. The platform, available in over 13 languages, is used across 110 countries today. Large enterprise customers have reported successes such as a 500% ROI through reduced recruiting agency spend; 50% reduction in time to hire; 115% increase in applicants; 85% reduction in time to discover diversity candidates; and 120% increase in filling roles with existing employees.
Every enterprise needs a platform like Eightfold’s to compete and thrive. The three most important assets a company has are the product/service it provides, its customers, and its people. Software companies that have built systems of record for and helped manage each of these core assets have become category-defining and highly-valued. For product/service, there is ERP/MRP (SAP, ORCL). For customers, there is CRM (e.g., Salesforce). For people, there is HRM (Workday, SAP/SuccessFactors). However, HRM is just about the administration of employees. There is no system of record for talent (people’s skills, capabilities, experiences relative to company needs). This is fundamentally Eightfold’s opportunity.
This need to manage talent has been greatly heightened by today’s overriding imperatives for digital transformation and globalization. Companies are fearful of getting “Amazon’d.” Eightfold allows enterprises to acquire and manage the talent required to run and transform their businesses — understanding what talent they have, what talent they need to meet their objectives, evaluating and acquiring that talent, and then managing/developing/retaining their talent.
Armed the $125M round, Ashu and Varun, together with President Kamal Ahluwalia (who helped grow Apttus, SaaS for Quote-to-Cash, to $200M in ARR), and the rest of the stellar Eightfold team, will further its leadership as the Talent Intelligence Platform of choice and transform talent management. In the face of COVID, the team executed brilliantly and took its strategic position, product, and customer growth to the next level. And there is much more to come — this team has the deep vision, ingenuity, and tenacity to continue innovating and radically transform the talent landscape.
We are honored to be part of their journey and also welcome Quentin Clark of General Catalyst, the lead investor of this round, to the team.
Peter Nieh is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. His investments include Eightfold.ai in enterprise, Nest in consumer, and QuantumScape in hard tech. In his free time, Peter chases all things round and spinning like frisbees and pizzas.
Lightspeed is a multi-stage VC firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the enterprise and consumer sectors. Lightspeed has backed 350+ companies globally in the past two decades including Nutanix, AppDynamics, MuleSoft, Snap and Nest.
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