AmazingHiring, a Moscow-based service for finding IT professionals, has attracted $500,000 in a second seed round, with equal contributions brought in by SMRK, a Kyiv (Kiev) based venture fund, and Altair, the seed-stage fund backed by Russo-Austrian serial investor Igor Ryabenkiy.
The startup is developing a search engine and browser plug-in for Chrome that recruiters can use to search for prospective candidates in the field of IT, especially programmers, Russian tech blog Siliconrus.com reported last week.
The service carries out the search via several dozens of resources on the Internet (the database has more than 50 sites listing vacancies as well as professional social networks), automatically evaluates the qualifications of a particular user and combines their data from different sites into one common profile.
Currently, AmazingHiring enables the search for developers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Siliconrus quoted project leader Vitaly Obernikhin as saying that funds raised will be spent on expanding the present team of technical experts (Java developers with knowledge of Hadoop), which will then focus on finalizing the various search algorithms and rankings of candidates. This should allow the company to challenge competitors in the USA and other countries.
It is necessary for the startup to go global, due to the small volume of the CIS market.
AmazingHiring was founded in November 2012 by a former employee of Parallels Vitaly Obernikhin and the owner of GMC recruitment agency Sergei Dmitrichenko. In 2013, during the first round, the startup raised $300,000 from SMRK and Russia’s Starta Capital.
Launched in November 2013, SMRK has invested in two startups so far. The fund targets IT projects in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Central Europe. “Startups from other countries are welcome as well,” the fund’s managing partner Andriy Dovzhenko told Ukraine Digital News.
SMRK, which has raised so far $10 million from undisclosed backers, is “still open to news LPs,” Dovzhenko said.
