Ranking and review platform Niche.com has surpassed 200 workers, though it's not looking to slow down anytime soon.
Co-Founder and CEO Luke Skurman said the Strip District-based company is looking to add 100 more employees across all sectors of its business, the primary focus of which relies on helping students find the right school or college for them by compiling data, reviews and insights into one location.
"We're excited to keep the growth going," Skurman said. "There's a lot of momentum internally in terms of partnering with more schools. We just crossed 2,000 school partnerships, and we still believe there are tens of thousands of schools that we haven't yet partnered with."
Skurman said the 200-worker milestone goes back to goals the company established about a year ago. The focus then still remains; investing in employee growth and its product. It accomplished a lot of that work following its April 2020 raise of $35 million in Series C funding led by Radian Capital and with participation from Salesforce Ventures, as well as the company's existing investors; Allen & Co. LLC and Tim Armstrong.
"The headline with Niche right now is that we have happy users, we have happy clients, we're a successful Pittsburgh company that's scaling and growing right now and really hitting the stride right now," Skurman said. "And yes, we are hiring aggressively right now. We anticipate hiring another 100 people over the next year in all facets of the business — engineering, product, design, sales, marketing, all across the board — it's a really exciting time in the company right now."
Founded in 2002 and initially named CollegeProwler by then-Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business students Skurman and Joey Rahimi, the company has since evolved from its original form of publishing print guidebooks on U.S. colleges to one that posts online rankings of K-12 schools, colleges, cities, neighborhoods and companies throughout the nation.
