HR organizations are facing a widening skills gap, economic headwinds and changing expectations around work. It is therefore no surprise that burnout and exhaustion are widespread in HR, with one questionnaire finding that 42% of teams struggle with too many projects and responsibilities.
Change starts with staff and management, some might say. Others who are more techno-utopian might offer HR technology as a solution. While there is quite a bit of dissatisfaction with HR technology providers (at least according to some data), to be fair to the tech-positive crowd, many companies see real value in HR technology. According to a recent Sapient reportMore than half of companies with more than 500 employees plan to increase HR technology spending by an average of 21% over the next year.
One of the beneficiaries of that increased spending is London-based Beamery, a startup developing a platform for talent lifecycle management. Beamery announced today that it has raised $50 million in a Series D round that values the company at $1 billion, bringing the company’s total amount raised to date to $228 million.
Teachers’ Ventures Growth (TVG), part of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, led the round. “I believe Beamery is in a good position to win because it provides a solution you can rely on through various economic cycles,” TVG’s Avid Larizadeh Duggan said in an emailed statement. “Beamery helps the world’s largest employers with this talent flexibility and enables them to unlock the potential of their workforce.”
Certainly, Beamery gained impressive traction this year, growing its customer base to “hundreds” of enterprises and over 25,000 users. Revenue from Fortune 500 clients increased more than 250% compared to June 2021, when Beamery closed its Series C round, according to the company, while net retention grew to 135%.
“Beamery’s … talent lifecycle management platform gives organizations such as General Motors, VMWare and Johnson & Johnson the information they need to make the right decisions about their workforce and supports them through every stage of the talent lifecycle – from recruiting to talent mobility and development to upskilling,” Abakar Saidov, CEO of Beamery, told businesskinda.com in an email interview. “The new financing supports continued investments in our platform and technical capabilities and helps build our global sales footprint.”
Beamery was founded in 2013 by Saidov and his brother, Sultan Saidov, along with Mike Paterson. The Saidov brothers say their vision for Beamery grew out of their experiences as the children of immigrants, as they became aware of the structural challenges associated with work. Paterson was previously an analyst at Morgan Stanley, while the Saidov brothers worked at Goldman Sachs – Abakar as a commodities trader and Sultan as an M&A analyst.
Founded as Seed Jobs, Beamery uses AI to identify potential candidates for job openings. Like many candidate matching platforms, Abakar Saidov says Beamery ranks skills based on the industry a company is recruiting for and a candidate’s relevant work experiences.
“Beamery used [AI] in our talent lifecycle management platform to give companies the information they need to plan for business needs and gaps, understand the skills and capabilities they have, and successfully attract, retain, upgrade their workforce schools and redeploy,” said Abakar Saidov. “[O]your models are not meant to replace people; instead, they provide relevant information to human decision-makers to make better decisions.”
Image Credits: Beamery
Given the increased focus on candidate-recommended AI systems, Abakar Saidov was quick to note that Beamery shows how various factors, including skills, seniority, ability and industry, influence his recommendations and to what extent. Beamery is one of several vendors that could potentially be subject to a New York City ordinance — the law on automated job decision-making tools, which goes into effect in January — that prohibits employers from using AI recruiting tools unless out of bias. audit may show that they will not. discriminate.
Abakar Saidov says Beamery recently underwent a third-party audit for bias in its AI capabilities, with the platform’s machine learning models “rigorously tested”. (Abakar Saidov didn’t proactively share a copy of the report with businesskinda.com; we requested one.) The company also partnered with Parity AI, a startup led by AI ethicist and activist Liz O’Sullivan, to develop the platform in a continuous base.
“Within the Beamery… platform itself (i.e. at the application layer), a key differentiator for us is helping customers ensure they themselves are compliant with the myriad of global personal data and privacy standards,” said Abakar Saidov . “We accomplish this primarily through the preference center, which allows candidates to determine their consent, whether and how companies can contact them, and control how AI is used against their profile.”
Of course, Beamery does not exist in a vacuum. HR technology software competitors include 15Five, which raised $52 million in July for its talent management solution. There’s also Gloat, a well-capitalized start-up building AI-powered internal job markets. Eightfold is one of the most formidable, with a valuation of over $2 billion and backing from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, General Catalyst, and Lightspeed.
Overall, VCs have shown a willingness to put money into HR tech startups even as other segments underperform. According to an analysis of WorkTech, the first half of this year saw the second largest global investment in work technology, rising to $9.4 billion, of which $4.6 billion was invested in the second quarter alone.
Despite layoffs in the technology industry, job growth has remained resilient despite the economic headwinds, boosting demand for HR technology – and spawning new suppliers as a result.
To stay ahead, Beamery has doubled down on its analytics capabilities since Series C, says Abakar Saidov, introducing a dashboard designed to empower companies to better understand their workforce by collecting skills data across disparate HR systems and – tools. The platform also recently rolled out a candidate portal that provides recommendations for jobs and skills they may need to advance their career in their chosen industry. And as a result of acquiring internal HR sourcing platform Flux, Beamery launched Beamery Grow, which Abakar Saidov describes as a “talent marketplace solution” to help employees gain new skills and connections within their organization.
“We are prioritizing improvements that allow customers to quickly and easily leverage their talent data for things like agile workforce planning, and ensure they have real-time information and insights about their current and future workforce allocation, the skills that exist in their organization relative to their business results and their achievement of diversity, equality and inclusion goals,” said Abakar Saidov. “The capabilities a company will need in the next decade will in many cases be very different from today, which is why HR technology solutions should be able to help companies build, buy or borrow the skills they need to run a business. Build a fit future workforce. ”
Beamery currently has 417 employees. When asked about recruitment plans, Abakar Saidov said they are “under development.”
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