BraveNewTalent, the ‘social recruitment’ platform, has secured an undisclosed amount of venture capital funding from Northzone Ventures and two angels noted for their experience in the recruiting industry: Pierce Casey and Mike Bourne. However, we understand the funding puts the startup within site of a full Series A round, with a further round of funding-raising in the offing.
Lucian Tarnowski, BraveNewTalent’s Founder & CEO said the investment would be used to hire and scale in the US market. BraveNewTalent already has a network of corporate clients starting in London which has brought in revenues and pushed the startup towards profitability already. Clients include IBM, Tesco, L’Oreal and McAfee.
Northzone, one of Europe’s leading venture funds which invested in Spotify and Lastminute.com, has experience in this market, previously backing Stepstone, the recruitment site launched during the dotcom boom.
As part of the investment, Bjorn Stray, co-founder and partner at Northzone will be joining the BraveNewTalent board. Stray was on the board of Stepstone between 1996 and 2009. Stray calls BraveNewTalent a potential “billion dollar market leader.”
On top of Northzone’s unique experience, BraveNewTalent is bringing on Pierce Casey and Mike Bourne as angel investors. Casey is a serial private investor in the recruitment sector, was co-founder of Walker Hamill and Imprint PLC and is currently chairman of Norman Broadbent. He’s also a former director of Apax Partners and Alchemy Venture Partners.
BraveNewTalent competes with BranchOut, a Facebook application that works out where your friends, and friends of friends – (and rather annoyingly seems to spam your Facebook wall). BranchOutsecured $6m from Accel, among others. BNT also competes with JIBE, Superscout and Emp.ly – however one of these quite have the focus BNT has on the needs of employers.
BNT recently launched a new Facebook app (here). This builds your professional profile but instead of letting potential employers see all your embarrassing Facebook profile photos, it gives them access to what they need to know about you – your education, work history and current employer – while you get to see information about them and also, more interestingly, stats on your friends.
