Belong: India's new outbound recruiter using AI to "acqui-hire"

It's not often the highlight of the industry, but the reality of startups is that most of them do fail: after all, trying out something new is always a risk.

And the results are that shuttering a startup is a stressful time as founders try to find alternative avenues for their staff as well as themselves.

Gurugram-based Quikmile was spared this trauma. The logistics tech startup got “acqui-hired" by telecom major Bharti Airtel in November 2019. The term commonly applies to acquisition of a failing startup for its tech talent. The Quikmile team got absorbed into Airtel’s X Labs “innovation factory" in Bengaluru.

Behind the scenes of this win-win outcome is Bengaluru-based HR tech startup Belong. “If 80% of startups are shutting down, that’s a pretty interesting pool of available talent with founder DNA. So we’re enabling our clients to do these acqui-hires," says Rishabh Kaul, Co-founder of Belong.

Global innovation centres of multinational companies vie with Indian corporations for tech talent in Bengaluru, which is also a leading hub for thousands of startups hustling for savvy developers. Belong’s AI engine, which crunches not only resumes but also other publicly available data like social media activity, arms recruiters with tools to discover and hook the right talent in this feeding frenzy. Global enterprises like Cisco, Adobe and Publicis are among its clients.

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