The Russian Internet Technology Fund (RITF) announced last week that it has injected CHF 1.5 million ($1.7 million) in Zurich-based Talentory AG, the operator of online headhunting platform Talentory.com, in exchange for “a substantial minority stake.”
The Talentory platform allows corporations to address and source the entire market of professional recruiting firms and find relevant partners, who will deliver their best candidate, thus shortening employers’ recruitment cycles and reducing their workload. For headhunters, Talentory brings a new acquisition channel with hundreds of accounts.
At present, the company claims to have enrolled more than 2,000 specialized headhunters making their portfolio of candidates available to more than 1,000 employers – including major global corporations – in Germany, France and Switzerland.
Talentory intends to use the proceeds from this Series B round to “further boost [its] sales momentum underpinned by [its] innovative and disruptive business model, to accelerate the international growth and to enter new industries and geographies faster.”
“We aim to serve the majority of Fortune-500 employers in coming years. We currently operate in Europe and will expand,” the company stated.
It is estimated that European companies spend more than estimated $10 billion annually for recruitment of permanent staff. More than 15% of this amount goes to search and placement fees related to external hires.
“In both developed and developing markets, demand for highly-skilled professionals has grown and will continue to grow over the long term. The recruitment market is also becoming more and more global as successful companies compete for human talent in each of their core geographies. Talentory is a great example of a huge, disruptive technology-enabled opportunity with a true win-win proposition for all market participants,” believe Evgeny Kaltashev, Managing Partner, and Sergey Safronov, Partner, at Black River Ventures, the managing company of RITF.
This international investment does not signal a shift in RITF’s investment strategy, which remains focused on Russia, as illustrated by its previous investments in e-book company Litres and SaaS accounting startup MoeDelo.org.
“We target companies with R&D run out of Russia and the CIS or for which Russia is seen as one of the key markets,” the fund’s PR director Natalia Beklemisheva told East-West Digital News.” Talentory has had its service platform developed in one of the CIS countries and targets Russia as one of its [next] markets, allowing its clients to use the platform globally, including in Russia.”
The Russian Internet Technology Fund was established in February of this year with the participation of Third Rome, a diversified group of companies involved in asset management, investment consulting and trading.
The fund targets Internet and IT companies at the growth stage, providing up to $5 million to each company. There are no specific restrictions for investments in Internet and IT related sectors. As of today, the Fund has already made several investments that total approximately $10 million.
