Masterbranch pockets €470k to put code at the heart of a developer's résumé

MasterbranchMasterbranch, which helps employers find good developers by putting open-source code contributions at the centre of a job seeker’s résumé, has raised €470k in a second round of funding, adding to the €110k secured in 2010.

The new funding comes from a group of recognized business angels out of Spain, including Marek Fodor, Carlos Domingo, Iñaki Arrola, Iñaki Ecenarro, Jesús Monleón, Albert Armengol, Eneko Knörr and Hugo Bloch, along with €350k of public funding from NEOTEC.

The Spanish startup is founded by Ignacio Andreu Dolset and Juan Luis Belmonte, two young and ambitious developers who were fed up with superficial résumés and wanted to make it easier for developers and companies who are hiring by making better use of the fact that many developers make open source contributions. Companies always complain that they have no way to contrast a candidate’s work. Masterbranch addresses this by making it easy for job-seeking developers to showoff their coding skills by linking their online profile/CV to their open source work at various destinations and in turn make their coding experience actually tangible and comparable for companies looking to hire technical talent.

The idea may well remind you of a bit of Github, a bit of Stackoverflow meets Sourceforge. But Masterbranch actually aggregates open source code found in many places including SouceForge, along with Apache, Codeplex, Google Code, as well as non open source work housed in Github. So unlike a regular resume or a LinkedIn profile, Masterbranch allows developers to contribute real projects to the mix.

A Masterbranch CV looks something like this. Currently, the analysis Masterbranch runs is quantitative but with this new round of funding they plan on investing in qualitative analysis to bring much more value to a user’s profile and hence the companies that rely on the service. The rest of the money is to be used on growing their userbase, which is currently at 6,000 active users, after having indexed and analyzed 500,000 projects from 350,000 programmer profiles. Users are well spread out through the globe: 21% USA, 12% Spain, 8% China, 5.7% Brazil, 4.2% Argentina, 4.2% Russia and with a tiny percentage in the rest of Western Europe.

Masterbranch is already working with leading brand names who are using their database free of charge in their hunt for solid developers. However, all good things come to an end. This round will also serve as a pivot for monetizing the platform. Apart from charging for monthly job posts, Masterbranch is looking at several models including freemium, subscription and credit packages for searching for, reviewing and contacting candidates.