SaaS Solution Provider Belong Raises $10M Series B Funding Led by Sequoia Capital

Belong, the world’s first predictive outbound hiring platform provider, today announced it has raised $10 million in Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital India, with participation from existing investor Matrix Partners India. The company said it will use the funds to accelerate product development, expand sales and support operations, and hire new talent across engineering, data science, enterprise sales and customer success. Gautam Mago, Managing Director at Sequoia Capital India Advisors, has joined the Belong Board of Directors, which includes Tarun Davda, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India, and Raju Reddy, Founder and ex-CEO of Sierra Atlantic.

Founded in 2014, Belong provides outbound hiring Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution to industry leaders like Cisco, Amazon, UHG, Tesco, Reliance Jio and ThoughtWorks. The company’s platform helps businesses discover and target high-fit talent, engage candidates through personalized interactions, and accelerate hiring cycles at scale. “With Belong, our recruiters are able to quickly cut through the noise, identify the right people with much greater accuracy and generate conversions more effectively than on mainstream hiring platforms. In today’s candidate-centric market, I’d say data-driven outbound hiring is clearly the most intelligent and scientific way to scale recruiting,” said Savita Hortikar, Head of Talent Acquisition - India, at ThoughtWorks.

Outbound hiring solutions like Belong are seeing rising demand because of diminishing returns on inbound hiring with top talent today no longer “applying” into jobs. Belong addresses this challenge head-on. While the platform’s Discovery solution uses machine intelligence to help recruiters target highly relevant candidates open to pursuing new opportunities, its Engagement solution enables recruiters to convert target candidates into interested candidates with 3X more efficiency than traditional platforms.

“Talented candidates today are overwhelmed by the ‘spray-and-pray’ tactics of traditional recruiting. Not only does it annoy them, but it also leads to poor engagement and conversions for recruiters,” said Vijay Sharma, CEO and Co-founder of Belong. “With Belong, hiring efforts can be highly targeted and personalized to generate win-win conversations where the company’s offering and the candidate’s needs are truly aligned. This is a vision for the future of recruiting, and we are thrilled to have Gautam and Sequoia India on this journey with us.”

“The team at Belong has demonstrated a relentless passion towards building a differentiated product that helps enterprises and growing companies alike in their toughest hiring challenges. In a world where companies need to respond to market realities quickly, Belong's AI-driven outbound approach to helping businesses discover and hire top talent is a step in the right direction. We couldn't be happier to partner with Belong to help accelerate their growth,” said Gautam Mago, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India Advisors.

Since Belong raised its Series A funding in June 2015, the company has doubled its number of mid-market and enterprise customers, and has seen a 411% year-on-year increase in the number of offers generated via its platform. On product innovation, it launched a series of industry-first features to automate diversity recruiting, bring company-specific relevance into people search, and offer automated talent market insights and reports.

Launching New Hiring Solution Belong Experts
Timed with the investment, Belong today also announced the launch of Belong Experts, a platform-based solution that connects employers to a verified network of independent talent experts for start-to-finish hiring support.

With Belong Experts, companies can:
• Engage ready-to-interview candidates who have been custom-sourced and qualified for their hiring needs.
• Get end-to-end hiring support from domain-specific talent experts, including candidate engagement, interview scheduling and coordination, and offer management.
• Get the Belong platform advantage, which includes AI-driven search, in-app collaboration with recruiting teams, and powerful job-based analytics to optimize hiring.

“As companies look to scale and recruit competitive talent, hiring expertise and speed have become crucial for success. By combining the power of the Belong platform with dedicated support from domain-specific talent experts, we are offering companies exactly that,” said Vijay Sharma, CEO and Co-founder of Belong.

Launched as a pilot last year, Belong Experts is already being leveraged by some of the fastest-growing companies, including Uber, LendingKart, Xola and Postman.

According to Abhinav Asthana, CEO and Co-founder of Postman, “Belong Experts has been our go-to talent platform for over a year now. We have made offers for highly complex roles in about 10-14 days on the platform. It's, in fact, one of the few solutions that combines high quality candidates with low time-to-fill ratios for our recruiting team.”