Chicago startup humanpredictions raised its first round of funding to expand its tech recruiting platform.
The startup announced Thursday that it raised $1.16 million in a round led by Chicago-based Network Ventures. Other investors include Washington, D.C.-based SaaS Ventures and local equity firms Hyde Park Angels and M25.
Humanpredictions gathers public data on technology professionals from sites like GitHub, Stack Overflow and Meetup, and organizes it into an easy-to-use database for tech recruiters and companies. The database includes more than 44 million tech professionals in roles ranging from software engineers and data science workers to iOS and Android developers.
“The simplest way to describe it is LinkedIn on steroids for tech recruiting,” said humanpredictions co-founder and CEO Elliott Garms.
The startup monitors how often tech professionals update their public profiles with machine learning and uses that information to give recruiters an idea of who may be looking for a job at a given time.
“We predict who is more open to opportunities based on their behavior online,” said Garms, who has held stints at Groupon and Dev Bootcamp Chicago. “It is based on this general idea that if you’re happy at work, you’re probably not updating a lot of professional information online.”
Additionally, humanpredictions helps facilitate conversations between companies and prospective employees, a feature especially valuable to non-traditional tech businesses, Garms said.
“Most non-traditional tech companies really [need] to become more technology-focused than they have been,” Garms said. “There’s a lot of companies that are seeing us as a great way to help them figure out how to get more technical.”
Humanpredictions has nearly 100 clients, including local companies like Allstate, Trunk Club, Tempus, Home Chef and Guaranteed Rate. Humanpredictions sells its software for $5,000 per year per user license and says it is approaching $1 million in annual revenue.
Since launching in 2015, Garms said humanpredictions has been growing through word-of-mouth and the founders’ professional networks. But with the new financing, the startup can accelerate its growth by hiring more engineers and data scientists, and by investing in sales and marketing. The startup currently employs 11 people.
“With this capital, we’ll be able to grow our team so that you can help grow yours,” Garms said.
