EXPERTIA AI, a deeptech virtual recruitment platform has raised $1.2m in seed funding led by marquee investors Chiratae Ventures and Endiya Partners with participation from Entrepreneur First and angel investor Archana Priyadarshini. Entrepreneur First, the UK based Talent Investor has doubled down on their previous pre seed funding into the startup last March. The funds will be used for assembling a team of AI Researchers and Software Engineers and creating brand, product awareness in the Indian market.
EXPERTIA AI was founded in 2021 by Akshay Gugnani, Research Scholar from IBM and MIT and serial entrepreneur Kanishk Shukla, who successfully exited Koovs.com post its listing on AIM/ LSE. EXPERTIA AI offers a one click hiring solution to SMEs helping them automatically source and identify Top 10 candidates from a pool of applicants invited from 25 plus job boards. Businesses are encouraged to connect their company website with their Expertia Career Page to collect all applicants to a smart centralized talent pool, helping them find relevant profiles across all open positions instantaneously.
Kanishk Shukla, Co-founder and CEO, said, “Our vision is to become a global skill cloud offering real time hiring as a service to businesses worldwide. Our first solution tailored for the SMEs is an AI powered Virtual Recruiter which uses proprietary algorithms, metadata and platform integrations to organically source and deliver top 10 job applicants within a few hours. The larger businesses however could access this intelligence as a service by integrating their ATS with Expertia AI and receive realtime fit – not fit recommendations for incoming job applications and alerts notifying them of qualified passive candidates in their historical pool of applicants”.
Regarding how Expertia AI plans to stand out in the crowded HR Tech space, Kanishk highlights the AI research background of the core engineering team, adding, “ We have published research and secured patents for our work in skill extraction and validation, skill graph generation and career path recommendation. Coupling these with multimodal and explainable AI, our ability to mine professional metadata at scale and our exclusive platform and distribution partnerships, we are confident of becoming the first port of call for for all SME hiring needs.
Confident of making Expertia AI the destination for all SME hiring, Akshay Gugnani, Co-founder and CTO added , “We are targeting 100 Job Board integrations in FY 23 up from 25 currently and improve the accuracy of our Top Talent recommendation up from 75% to 85% by the end of the year surpassing the abilities of a trained recruiter. We will also focus on acquiring and employing publicly available meta data at scale to help us go beyond what is written in a job description and resume, understand business needs and hiring preferences and offer curated candidates for higher conversion and retention.”
The HRTech SaaS platform operates a Freemium model, offering unlimited sourcing and screening of candidates to Startups for Free with premium opt-in features for larger organizations under paid subscriptions.
“The future of work will be defined by how companies hire and retain talent in the post-pandemic world. We see Expertia AI bringing an AI-powered platform to the world, delivering the best match between candidates and opportunities through automated extraction and matching of skills and we are excited to partner with them,” added Sudhir Sethi, Chairman and Founder, Chiratae Ventures.
Sateesh Andra of Endiya Partners, commented, “There is an urgent need for Companies to hire better candidates sooner. Expertia AI-enabled ATS platform helps attract quality employees in less time. Kanishk and Akshay bring together a good mix of Tech / AI and Business / Domain expertise to make this happen. Endiya is excited to partner with them in building this new-age recruitment and skill platform.”
Operating in the Future of Work domain, the company intends to capture a slice of the over $500 billion annual spend on recruitment and associated technology done by businesses globally. Later in the year Expertia AI has plans to offer Skill Advisory solutions to business’ employees helping companies reskill, upskill, retain professionals and close the $8.5 trillion skill gap globally.
