A success story – Recruitment start-up Giraffe closes second funding round

South Africa Giraffe, the automated high-volume recruitment start-up, today announced that it has closed a second round of equity funding, led by Edge Growth’s Vumela Fund with participation from Omidyar Network, the Brozin family’s Forever Young Capital and Catapult Trust.

Giraffe uses mobile technology and matching algorithms to enable businesses to recruit high volumes of quality, medium-skilled staff faster and more affordably than any other recruitment method, and gives medium-skilled jobseekers more access to opportunities at no cost.

Since launching in 2015, Giraffe has attracted over half a million jobseekers and invited over 150 thousand candidates for interviews.

Businesses that need to recruit more than 10 staff per month can submit a simple staff request online at www.giraffe.co.za. Giraffe then uses proprietary matching technology to source and screen relevant candidates within as little as three days from the initial request. As such, Giraffe aims to provide businesses with on-demand access to high volumes of quality candidates, making it ideal for call centres, insurance sales organisations, field sales organisations and other businesses that hire large volumes of staff on a regular basis.

The second funding round comes exactly two years after Giraffe raised seed investment from Omidyar Network, the Silicon Valley venture fund established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

Badri Pillapakkam, investment partner at Omidyar Network, says: “Giraffe continues to revolutionise the hiring process in South Africa, especially for medium-skilled workers.

“The seasoned and mission-aligned founding team, the product roadmap towards full-stack hiring automation, and the opportunity for disrupting high-volume medium-skilled recruitment across emerging markets, excites us.”

Giraffe’s funding round comes at an opportune time, with South Africa’s new leadership putting job creation at the forefront of the agenda.

Giraffe CEO Anish Shivdasani says: “We realise that since we excel at delivering large volumes of quality candidates to businesses whenever they need them, we can simultaneously give jobseekers more access to opportunities.

“Over the past two years we have made significant progress evolving our product, growing our user base and driving revenues. We feel we have reached the stage to take on additional capital to accelerate our growth, and we’re excited to bring a truly amazing group of investors on board.”

Edge Growth’s Vumela Fund head Janice Johnston expressed her excitement to be leading the funding round: “Giraffe initially came to our attention two years ago due to its innovative, scalable business model solving such a critical problem in South Africa. We followed Giraffe’s progress and were impressed by the team’s ability to gain traction and to meet the key milestones they set for themselves as well as the robust tech platform they were building; we are excited to join the highly regarded existing and new shareholders to build on Giraffe’s strong foundations.”