South African tech talent marketplace OfferZen has raised a EUR4.5 million (US$5.1 million) Series A funding round as it bids to deepen its expansion into European markets.
Founded in 2015 and launched in 2016, the Cape Town-based OfferZen helps tech companies like Luno, Absa, MMI Holdings, Takealot, WeTransfer, Adyen and Catawiki hire from a community of over 100 000 software makers.
The startup has grown to become the leading tech talent marketplace in South Africa, and expanded to the Netherlands in April 2020 after acquiring TryCatch, a recruitment tech startup based in Amsterdam. It now plans further European growth after securing EUR4.5 million (US$5.1 million) in Series A growth funding from Base Capital, a South African investment company.
This is OfferZen’s first round of external funding, with the startup having been bootstrapped since its founding in 2015. The capital will help OfferZen invest in the local tech community and grow its operations, product and growth teams as it deepens its expansion into Europe, with the aim to expand to two additional countries in 2022.
“Right now tech hiring is growing at a rate well beyond our wildest expectations. We’re seeing record numbers of both developers and companies signing up to use the OfferZen platform. We experienced a 29 per cent increase in placements between the third and fourth quarter of 2021 alone,” said OfferZen co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Philip Joubert.
“Tech hiring came to a near standstill in the first half of 2020 due to COVID-19. Since then we’ve seen a huge acceleration in the market – companies are now raising far more capital than they were pre-pandemic, investing more in technology and subsequently hiring much faster. Access to top tech talent has become the bottleneck for many companies and we’re in a position to help companies solve that.”
