[Updated, 12:30 pm with comments from CEO Daniel Chait.] New York-based Greenhouse Software announced Friday it raised $35 million in a Series C round led by Thrive Capital, with returning investors Benchmark, Groupe Arnault, and The Social+Capital Partnership participating.
Greenhouse developed a hiring software platform—which includes getting jobs listed across the Web and social media, scheduling interviews, and scoring prospective hires—that companies use to find and recruit new staff. Funding from the latest round will go towards new hires in Greenhouse’s own ranks, particularly in sales, marketing, and product development, as well as expansion into new markets.
Hiring has already been well underway at the company. CEO and co-founder Daniel Chait says Greenhouse currently has about 125 employees, mostly in New York. The company started the year with 45 on staff, and he expects to finish 2015 with about 200 people working for Greenhouse. The company also has offices in San Francisco, and may expand overseas, Chait says.
The new funding will also be used to explore some new initiatives that he did not want to reveal just yet. Chait says some of his customers include companies from the New York innovation scene, such as Percolate and Digital Ocean.
The recruiting technology sector is getting more and more crowded, with a host of companies offering software and services to sort out potential hires. New York-based Take The Interview, for example, offers a cloud-based video interview service that companies can use to screen potential hires. There are also companies such as ApplicantPro, Workable, and Newtown that provide software platforms to help with the recruiting and applicant tracking process.
Chait says Greenhouse is not ducking the competition, and he welcomes the different software being used in different parts of the human resources and hiring process. Greenhouse is an open platform, he says, with an application programming interface (API) that lets companies integrate its software with other sourcing tools. “If you want to use Hired.com and Entelo to find candidates, you can staple them all together in our API,” Chait says.
Despite the growing competition, Greenhouse seems to have investors’ favor. Its latest funding follows a $13.6 million Series B round raised back in March. So far Greenhouse has raised nearly $60 million since its founding in 2012.
Chait says he has a background in programming, having previously built a software consulting service on Wall Street; he also handled recruiting for that company. When he and his co-founders started Greenhouse, they saw that recruiting the best candidates was a top priority for many businesses. However, it could also be a point of frustration for hiring managers, interviewers, and executives, he says. “The idea behind Greenhouse was to fix that problem.”
