The Denver-based software company PAIRIN will add artificial intelligence to its career planning platform following its acquisition of Savviest, a resume and cover letter creator founded in Glenwood Springs.
PAIRIN was launched a decade ago and works with governments and workforce agencies to support people looking to find new careers by connecting them to needed tools and education. Its platform is meant to make hiring and screening more equitable.
With its acquisition of Savviest, an AI platform founded in 2018, PAIRIN will add the startup's AI-powered resume builder to its host of services. Savviest's technology leads users through the process of creating resumes and cover letters and make suggestions. For example, the tool will alert users about grammar and phrasing mistakes and offer advice about including certain skills and achievements.
The new tech will allow PAIRIN's clients to focus on other aspects of their career journeys, said PAIRIN founder and CEO Michael Simpson.
"A lot of the workforce organizations we work with spend a lot of time training people how to write resumes," Simpson said. "Someone might be in a program for eight weeks, and you'd be amazed at what percentage of the time they spend on crafting resumes and cover letters. One of the things I wanted to help these organizations with is to let them focus on other things and let the software help people write resumes."
Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. PAIRIN will retain Savviest's staff as part of the deal, including its co-founders, Jared Carlson and Devin Owen. The addition brings PAIRIN to about 30 employees, Simpson said.
"After getting to know the people at PAIRIN... it became clear that joining the team will allow us to multiply our impact and more quickly realize our vision of helping millions of people build careers that they love," Owen said in a statement.
The acquisition follows PAIRIN's close in February of its Series B financing round. The company raised $2.1 million and added another $2 million as a line of credit. Sixteen investors participated in the round, including JFFLabs, Juvo Ventures, New Markets Venture Partners and Potencia Ventures.
PAIRIN plans to grow its sales, marketing and engineering staff with the raise and has added seven new employees since the round closed. The funding and additional staff will allow the company to pursue a more aggressive strategy for growth, Simpson said.
Part of the strategy is expanding into more states. PAIRIN has worked on projects in 13 states and completed statewide implementations of its platform in Florida, Colorado and Washington, D.C., Simpson said.
The state of Colorado used PAIRIN’s platform to create My Colorado Journey, which connects job seekers and students with job opportunities. In October, Colorado awarded the company another multi-year contract to modernize the Department of Labor and Employment's case management and labor exchange system.
The economic downturn that began in 2022 has led to increased demand in PAIRIN's platform, with more people turning to workforce agencies to be connected to jobs, Simpson said.
"We have a lot of deals in the pipeline," he said. "Our pipeline right now is 10 times what it was in 2021."
The surge in demand follows a lull that PAIRIN experienced at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time, PAIRIN's deals were all paused when hiring freezes took hold.
Federal economic relief funding was approved for states, some of which were set aside to help displaced workers. However, it took state governments about two years to decide what to do with the funding and go through the contracting process, Simpson said. Now, PAIRIN is experiencing the results of that boost in funding to states.
"Once the funding started to come, the businesses who work in the space that we're in started to benefit from it," Simpson said.
Simpson expects PAIRIN's acquisition of Savviest to bolster its momentum. The acquisition is the second for the company, and Simpson said he may pursue other acquisitions in the future.
Simpson is a mentor with Techstars, the early-stage technology accelerator based in Boulder, and he's always on the watch for technology that could fit within PAIRIN's mission, he said.
"All of these types of acquisitions are really to round out our offering and to really help the people that we serve not only to find the right career, but actually get the job," Simpson said.
