Belong, a company which helps organisations hire talent, has raised $10 million in funding from venture capital firm Sequoia Capital India and participation from existing investors, reports the Mint. The startup will use the funds to expand its client base and improve its product. This is Belong’s second round of funding - it had previously raised funding worth $5 million during launch, from Matrix Partners, and with participation from Blume Ventures and various individual investors. Launched in June 2015, the company claims to have over 80 clients including Cisco, Amazon, UnitedHealth Group, EY and Thoughtworks. Belong says that it uses data science and predictive analysis to look for candidates in the engineering and tech fields. The platform’s search and recommendation engine claims to analyze social, Internet and public sources to match them with companies’ culture and skill requirements. It offers personalised interactions with social insights, also analysing the candidate’s openness to new opportunities. Its filter factors include the candidate’s home state, marital status, and women to men sex ratio at the workplace among others. Founded by Vijay Sharma and Sudheendra Chilappagari in 2014, the company claims that its prediction engine is refined by user behaviour and ‘activity signals’, when a candidate is looking for a new job, from social media and the internet. Other than this, it provides email smart tracking with customised subject lines to woo candidates. The Bangalore-based startup currently claims to have 85 employees, which it plans to expand to 100 over the next year and half.
