Delhi based SaaS hiring enabler GrownOut raises funding from Matrix Partners India

Delhi based GrownOut, a business-to-business startup based on a SaaS model has raised its first institutional round of founding from Matrix Partners India. GrownOut will use the funds for deepening its analytics expertise, product development and growing its business. They have earlier raised seed investment from Outbox Ventures. This is the second investment from Matrix Partners in the past 2 weeks in Delhi region, earlier they invested in Limetray started by co-founder of Foodpanda.

Finding and hiring talent is becoming a bigger problem for every company globally. Inspite of many hiring platforms, referral still remains the most preferred source of hire for most companies. Referral candidates are generally hired faster and stay at companies much longer compared to any other recruiting medium. Grownout is out there in an attempt to make this process as smooth as possible. Grownout ensures that the company gets the network of all of its employees first hand and do not need to depend on the employees to reach out to them. The startup's vision is to productise such techniques and serve their clients using online platforms and emerge as a primary hiring tool for the industry.

When we last spoke to the team, they were focussing only on Indian market and had 12 B2B active users for the first version of their product that was released in March 2014.

GrownOut was started by Sumit Gupta and Harsimran Walia. Sumit was born and brought up in a small town in Rajasthan. He graduated in Computer Science & Engineering from New Delhi. Harsimran is from Chandigarh. After completing mechanical engineering from IIT Delhi, he worked with Oracle and then Macfeebefore taking the entrepreneurial plunge with GrownOut. The transition from a well-paying regular job to running a startup was a little rough for Harsimran. After all, you don’t get a hefty paycheck in your account anymore. But the adrenaline rush of being an entrepreneur and the fun of doing what you love soon outweighed the initial pangs. GrownOut has been deployed at several leading companies including Quikr, Ola, Appiterate, Stayzilla and Winshuttle amongst others.

Hiring is a problem everyone is trying to tackle and overcome but differently, sharing more about their effort and vision forward Sumit says,

We are building the next generation referral hiring platform to make recruiting more efficient and cost-effective. Despite incredible innovations in technology in the last decade, recruiting still remains a fundamental challenge in the industry and an unsolved problem. We believe there is a disruptive market opportunity which can change old methods and make hiring a painless process. Our partnership with Matrix Partners will provide us the necessary support to realize our vision.

India still hasn't seen any major innovation in recruiting products that are sector agnostic, most of it is still very traditional. Believing in vision of Grownout and investing in the team, Tarun Davda, Director, Matrix India shared,

The recruitment market in India is large and has traditionally been served by staffing agencies, job-boards and career sites. However, HR heads of companies still struggle with a barrage of unsuitable resumes, long recruitment cycles and candidates that are a poor-fit with company culture. We believe there are several opportunities to solve the hiring needs of Indian SMBs and Matrix Partners India will make multiple investments in this space. Referral hiring - the holy grail of recruitment results in shorter hiring cycles, lower hiring costs and higher employee retention. We share Sumit and Harsimran’s vision to deliver a truly world-class solution for referral hiring to Indian SMBs.

Technology adoption is one of the biggest challenges before GrownOut. “Most of our end users are non-technical and like to stick to their traditional methods, which creates hurdles in making them realize the value that GrownOut provides them,” Sumit says.

Building a strong team is a huge challenge for all startups but as that’s GrownOut core competency, it was a walk in the park for them according to Sumit. “We were the first to take advantage of the GrownOut dream that we are living,” he says.

GrownOut was founded with a vision of solving the hiring requirements of the industry using the latest available technologies. The company utilises well researched techniques of referral hiring to make candidate sourcing easier and more efficient.

With the help of GrownOut, organisations can harness the power of their employee's professional network to recruit high-quality candidates.

Website: GrownOut