Matrix, Snapdeal founders back hiring startup 'Belong'

MUMBAI: Top-tier venture capital fund Matrix Partners, and Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal are among a group of early investors backing Bengaluru-based recruitment startup Belong, which scans social media, internet and public sources to identify potential candidates for jobs.
The eight-month-old outfit works on a software-as-aservice (SaaS) model and is already hiring for fast-growing companies like Ola, Practo and Xiaomi, among others.Seed-stage investor Blume Ventures, Redbus founder Phaninder Sama and Sierra Atlantic's Raju Reddy also participated in the $5-million (Rs 32-crore) series A round -led by Matrix -in Belong.

Founded by BITS gradu ates Vijay Sharma and Sudheendra Chilappagari, Belong helps companies discover talent through data science and predictive analytics. The recruitment startup gains insights into whether professionals are passively open to new opportunities by analyzing their presence across the internet.



“I worked at Practo and Exotel where I did a lot of hiring as I was trying to scale up both the teams.We noticed that great engineers or product managers are normally never actively applying or looking for jobs. You need to track them where they hang out, excite them, and win them over. So the way the product functions today is largely built from our own experiences and understanding of how talent hiring should happen in a data-driven and social age,“ said Sharma. Belong, which has helped hire 100-plus candidates across 15 companies like Snapdeal, Zivame, LocalOye and Akosha, among others, plans to invest heavily in growing its team and technology . “We intend to triple-down on our product and focus on our data sciences, R&D and engineering,“ Sharma said.The focus for Belong currently is hiring for tech talent but the startup will diversify into data science and design soon. It will then open up to other functions, including sales, marketing and consulting.

“Despite advances in technology , recruitment heads of companies struggle with a barrage of ill-suited resumes, ong recruitment cycles and candidates that are a poor-fit with company culture. Belong s revolutionizing how companies discover, engage and hire top-quality talent,“ said Tarun Davda, director, Matrix India, an investor in Ola, Quikr and Practo. “We have made five SaaS investments in the past year and plan to continue investing aggressively to build upon our global SaaS franchise,“ Davda said.

Early-stage investors have been pouring capital into specialized online recruitment startups at a time when employers are looking to go beyond the plain-vanilla job posting portals that currently dominate the $1-billion strong search and recruitment market. VCs are increasingly seeding these next-generation, tech-backed hiring startups that claim to have differentiated offerings compared to the existing players, most of which had sprung up in the late 1990s during the first wave of Indian internet startups.