HackerRank, the technical recruitment platform and code-challenge community, today announced that it has raised a $9.2 million Series B funding round led by Khosla Ventures and Battery Ventures. Other participants in this round include Motorola Mobility VP Peeyush Ranjan, former Facebook senior director of engineering Greg Badros and Facebook director of product management Dan Rubinstein.
The HackerRank team decided to go with these investors because of their expertise around hiring for, and work with, fast-growing companies.
“As software and data science becomes a critical tool for every industry, there will be intense competition for talent in this area,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, in a statement today. “HackerRank is clearly the first mover and lead player. This is why we’re leading this round.”
The service has changed some since it first went through Y Combinator and then launched as a platform for hosting coding challenges at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012. While coding challenges remain among its core focus areas, most of the company’s growth now comes from its white label recruiting platform.
Indeed, as HackerRank CEO and co-founder Vivek Ravisankar told me, the company has doubled its revenue every quarter for the last three quarters based on the strong performance of this service. Monthly active users on the platform are also growing 20 to 25 percent every month. Currently, about half a million developers are active on the site.
That’s another reason the company decided to raise more money. HackerRank wants to grow its sales team rapidly to capitalize on the current momentum. On the product side, the company plans to expand to more domains that include a wider range of skills than today’s code-focused platform. These include topics like networking and database administration.
Companies can use sponsored coding challenges on the service to find potential hires, but in addition, the service also now offers a real-time whiteboard with a built-in code editor for technical phone interviews.
Among the companies that currently use the service are Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, VMware, Skype and Square, but Ravisankar also noted that the service has made inroads with companies that aren’t necessarily associated with tech.