Prismforce, an India-American startup that provides IT and technical services firms with tools to build a better talent supply chain, has raised $13.6 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India.
IT providers spend a large part of their variable costs on hiring skilled employees. But finding those employees from the ever-expanding talent market and deploying them effectively to achieve adequate results is one of the major pain points for the industry worldwide.
Prism power follows Amazon’s approach to matching talent demand with supply for companies offering IT and technical services, said co-founder and CEO Somnath Chatterjee.
“We treat this as a supply chain problem, where you have to standardize the demand, standardize the supply, make the match, almost as if you were an e-commerce engine and an e-commerce marketplace trying to talent market,” he said in an interview with businesskinda.com.
After 14 years as a partner at McKinsey, Chatterjee co-founded Prismforce with Mohd Qasim in April 2021. Qasim also worked as a senior engagement manager at McKinsey.
While at the management consulting firm, both co-founders served several IT providers, which helped them identify the problem Prismforce wants to solve.
Prismforce’s product catalog includes SkillPrism, which uses AI instead of a skills management application to automate talent profiling. The startup also offers IntelliPrism for an end-to-end resource management module with AI-driven search and matching, OutlookPrism to enable workforce scheduling and resource forecasting, and InsightPrism to provide CXO dashboards.
The Delaware-registered startup, which has a wholly owned Indian subsidiary and offices in San Francisco, Mumbai and Bengaluru, is currently on track to have 10 clients by the end of this year, with the smallest client generating $400 million in revenue. , while its largest counterpart made over $10 billion. Chatterjee did not reveal their names but said half of them have a presence in India, while half are US-based companies.
The director said he expects the geographic proportion of the startup’s clients to shift over time, with 70-80% coming from English-speaking countries such as the US, UK and Europe.
While Prismforce’s primary focus is limited to companies that provide IT and technical services, it also targets entities in the enterprise IT domain. The startup also plans to reach professional services firms in the future, including accounting, tax and consulting firms, Chatterjee said.
“It is much more relevant for IT companies because the underlying skills change very quickly, which is not the case for many of these consulting and professional services firms. But that could be the third horizon we can go to,” he noted.
With new funding from Sequoia Capital India and global angel investors, Prismforce plans to scale its go-to-market reach, enhance its product suite and grow its talent base from its existing team of over 60 members to a group of 120-140 over the next nine to 12 months.
“The technology services industry, with a cumulative market capitalization of more than $4 trillion and a global workforce of more than 20 million, is a core pillar of the global digital economy. Despite this, there is no major vertical software vendor that can meet its diverse needs,” said Abhishek Mohan, director of Sequoia Capital India, in a prepared statement.
“Somnath and Qasim’s vision is to create the industry’s leading vertical technology and professional services software company. Over the past year, this vision has been validated by multiple leading IT providers, who have deployed Prismforce products with high impact.”
Prismforce has raised a total of $15.4 million to date, of which $1.8 million was injected into a seed funding round a year ago by an undisclosed group of angel investors, including serial entrepreneurs and SaaS founders.
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