South African recruitment startup Giraffe has closed a second round of equity funding as it looks to accelerate its already impressive growth.
The round raised by Giraffe, which is led by Edge Growth’s Vumela Fund with participation from Omidyar Network, the Brozin family’s Forever Young Capital, and Catapult Trust, comes exactly two years after it secured seed investment from Omidyar Network.
Giraffe uses mobile technology and matching algorithms to enable businesses to recruit high volumes of quality, medium-skilled staff in a faster and more affordable manner, and gives medium-skilled jobseekers more access to opportunities at no cost.
Since launching in 2015, Giraffe has attracted over 500,000 jobseekers and invited over 150,000 candidates for interviews.
“We realise that since we excel at delivering large volumes of quality candidates to businesses whenever they need them, we can simultaneously give jobseekers more access to opportunities,” said chief executive officer (CEO) Anish Shivdasani.
“Over the past two years we have made significant progress evolving our product, growing our user base and driving revenues. We feel we have reached the stage to take on additional capital to accelerate our growth, and we’re excited to bring a truly amazing group of investors on board.”
Edge Growth’s Vumela Fund head Janice Johnston expressed her excitement to be leading the funding round.
“Giraffe initially came to our attention two years ago due to its innovative, scalable business model solving such a critical problem in South Africa,” she said.
“We followed Giraffe’s progress and were impressed by the team’s ability to gain traction and to meet the key milestones they set for themselves as well as the robust tech platform they were building; we are excited to join the highly regarded existing and new shareholders to build on Giraffe’s strong foundations.”
