Karat Pioneers the Interviewing Cloud to Transform Technical Hiring, Secures $110M in Series C Funding

Tiger Global leads funding to rapidly scale and accelerate adoption of the Karat Interviewing Cloud as the preeminent standard for hiring engineering talent

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Karat, the world leader in technical interviewing and pioneer of the Interviewing Cloud, today announced a $110 million Series C funding round at a $1.1 billion valuation. Karat’s industry-defining human + technology solution delivers live technical interviews on behalf of clients 24/7 while forging deep strategic partnerships that unlock enormous value for engineering and talent acquisition leaders.

Software engineers are the lifeblood of the modern organization, and the gap between the supply of talent and demand will continue to widen in the coming decades. In the race to hire, companies are investing $60 billion a year of engineering time spent interviewing. Yet, despite that investment, most organizations don’t have enough bandwidth to interview at the necessary scale and velocity to compete for top talent. Furthermore, the time that is being invested is ineffective as do-it-yourself interviews fail to create a structured, consistent, and candidate-centric hiring process.

“Just like the public cloud moved everyone from private computing to shared infrastructure, Karat’s Interviewing Cloud is upending the old way of do-it-yourself interviewing that eats into valuable engineering time and fails to delight candidates,” said Mohit Bhende, Karat co-founder and CEO. “By professionalizing interviewing and developing purpose-built interviewing technology, Karat enables companies to innovate faster and candidates to showcase their strengths in a comfortable environment.”

The twofold benefit of reclaiming engineering time and accelerating technical hiring is driving massive adoption of the Interviewing Cloud. Karat has tripled bookings and doubled its number of customers over the past year. In addition to the rapid growth, Karat continues to deepen its partnerships, with the average enterprise client doubling their contract size year-over-year, including eight companies now spending more than $1M per year.

“Karat’s Interviewing Cloud has been a game-changer for us. We’ve gotten back over 25,000 hours of developer time that we’re able to spend innovating and building products," said Joseph Sirosh, CTO at Compass. "Our candidates love the Karat experience and they move more quickly through the process. Without Karat, it would have been a challenge to grow our engineering team at the pace that we have, and with the high talent bar that we have.”

Karat’s impressive growth and market opportunity motivated inside-investors, including Norwest Venture Partners, 8VC, Exor, Base Partners, and Sempervirens Fund, to join Tiger Global in expanding their investments. Collectively, these investors account for 99% of the latest capital raise.

"We believe Karat’s human + technology Interviewing Cloud is the way most companies will hire engineers,” said Scott Shleifer, partner at Tiger Global. “We know the gap between the supply of engineering talent and demand will continue to widen and are excited to deepen our investment in the category creator and leader."

The new capital will allow Karat to rapidly scale its global infrastructure and go-to-market function to accelerate growth. Karat is also investing heavily in data science and interview innovation to unlock insights for companies and accelerate hiring processes for candidates. Karat’s market intelligence will deliver unparalleled benchmarking insights driven by the world’s largest cross-company interview dataset.

“Karat’s Interviewing Cloud has become a significant differentiator for how we hire engineers,” said Jonathan Kehoe, Director of Talent at Wayfair. “Karat is incredibly consistent and has data nobody else has, it’s like holding a mirror up to your full hiring process and seeing what’s working well and where you need to improve.”

The expertise and data generated from hundreds of thousands of interviews also allows Karat to create more candidate-centric experiences, particularly for software engineers who have been previously overlooked by traditional hiring practices.

“Innovations like the redo, candidate feedback and our Brilliant Black Minds program are giving candidates from nontraditional backgrounds more opportunities to break into tech and are creating more equitable hiring processes,” said Jeffrey Spector, Karat co-founder and President. “As we launch Karat’s next chapter of growth, delivering fair and inclusive candidate experiences continues to be our North Star.”

To learn more about Karat, visit karat.com.

About Karat

Karat created the world’s first Interviewing Cloud to solve the multi-decade global shortage of software engineers. The Interviewing Cloud is an always-on, scalable, and consistent human + technology solution for conducting predictive, fair, and enjoyable technical interviews 24/7. Karat’s global network of Interview Engineers, unparalleled market intelligence, and purpose-built interviewing infrastructure opens the pipeline for engineering talent, limits pedigree bias, and provides access for underrepresented candidates. The fastest growing and largest enterprises such as Roblox, American Express, Intuit, Compass, and Wayfair trust Karat to expand hiring capacity, unlock developer time, and raise engineering quality so they can innovate and grow. For more information, please visit: www.karat.com.