NEW YORK, March 21, 2019 — Fetcher, the outbound recruiting platform that combines AI with human expertise to recruit top talent for high-growth companies, is excited to announce its latest round of funding as well as several key executive hires.
In late 2018, Fetcher raised $5.4MM in an oversubscribed seed round led by Accomplice and Slow Ventures, with full participation by existing investors, Picus and Revel Partners, as well as angel investors which include Paul English(founder of Kayak), Amol Sarva (founder of Knotel) and James Joaquin (co-founder of Obvious Ventures). They’ve also brought into the organization several industry leaders to help scale their business.
“With our latest round of funding, we were able to hire several outstanding executives and industry luminaries to lead our Sales, Customer Success and Operations teams,” says co-founder and CEO, Andres Blank. “We’re also focused on using our funding to scale our Data Science and Engineering teams to ensure amazing product innovations for our customers.”
Fetcher reimagines recruiting by utilizing AI to automate the recruiting process for large and small companies alike. There are currently 7MM open jobs in the US and Fetcher’s success rate in recruiting top-tier, diverse candidates for those openings is garnering the attention of high-growth organizations like Peloton, Paperless Post, Equinox, AppNexus, Bridgestone and DigitalOcean, which rely on Fetcher to help grow their teams.
“At Fetcher, we believe the best people are typically engaged in their work, and you have to proactively recruit them. Top candidates will rarely be found via job boards, in marketplaces, or through your inbound applications,” says co-founder, Genevieve Jurvetson. “The challenge is that most companies don’t have the time or domain expertise to effectively find and attract the best people. Fetcher does the heavy lifting so that recruiting teams and hiring managers can focus on what they do best —providing an amazing candidate experience.”
Fetcher uses a human-in-the-loop approach to complement their AI-powered recruiting, ensuring the highest quality matches for their clients with the greatest efficiency. With Fetcher, recruiters and hiring managers spend on average 15 minutes a week in the platform to launch dozens of outreach emails and follow up messages to qualified candidates. This same effort would take approximately 12 hours a week with traditional recruiting practices.
To ensure high response rates, Fetcher has an in-house team that partners with clients to draft compelling outreach messages. By syncing with the customer’s Gmail or Outlook account, they can then automate the entire outreach process, including follow-ups, which has proven to be incredibly effective. Last year, 27% of Fetcher hires occurred after the 2nd or 3rd follow up.
“Thoughtful recruiting requires a level of human expertise that’s not fully replicable by machines today. We believe Fetcher’s unique combination of AI and human intuition is the smartest and fastest way for a company to scale,” says Sam Lessin, Partner at Slow Ventures.
Just as sales and marketing were transformed over the last decade by data driven technologies, recruiting is undergoing its own transformation thanks to emerging data and analytics technologies. Automation, metrics and big data are now the hallmarks of intelligent recruiting and hiring. This is changing the way companies find new employees. The automated process helps combat bias in hiring and in discovering the best candidates — whether they are actively seeking jobs or already employed.
Fetcher is also growing its own team. In 2019 they hired several top industry executives to help scale their outbound recruiting platform:
Scott Fowle, Chief Revenue Officer. Scott was previously at SmashFly where he served as Chief Strategy Officer. Scott is a passionate leader who loves to pioneer change, challenge the norm and drive new concepts to achieve better business results. “It is amazing to witness how changing a paradigm can be so instrumental towards optimizing an entire business,” he says. He was previously an executive at HireVue and SAP SuccessFactors and sits on the board of the non-profit organization, Inner City Impact.
Korneel Bouman, Chief Customer Officer. Korneel was previously at Stack Overflow where he led their Customer Success team. Korneel grew the customer success function to a team of eleven customer success managers, spread out over four time zones and worked with marketing and sales management to help define the customer journey. “I love to sit in the middle of it all. To make sure that all the dots are connected and that the client is supported, heard and enabled throughout their journey,” he says. Prior to Stack Overflow, he was the co-founder and president of The Brooklyn Design Company.
Dario Salas Machado, VP of Finance. Before joining Fetcher, Dario was at Univision where he was Director of Ad Sales Analytics. Dario made his mark with astute industry research and ad-hoc analyses on internal, market and macroeconomic challenges to develop ad sales strategy and financial planning. He also conducted deep-dive data analyses to better understand revenue status and develop an effective strategy to operate and value enterprise partnerships. He was previously co-founder and CEO of MDI Holding.
Tara Cooper, VP of Sales and Enablement. Tara also comes to Fetcher via SmashFly where she was VP of Sales Enablement. Tara knows how to effectively influence strategy, train and build teams, and find ways to overcome challenges. “I am energized when I have the opportunity to take really great ideas and turn them into reality,” she says. Prior to SmashFly, she led Sales Operations & enablement efforts at HireVue.
Fetcher’s platform has already helped hundreds of companies save time, money and reduce bias. With its new team members and successful funding round behind it, Fetcher looks forward to continuing this path and meeting the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in 2019.