Triplebyte acquires $35M in a bid to link employers to engineers

Having the right skill set but the wrong credentials shouldn't deter computer scientists from having access to jobs that otherwise qualify - at least, that's the goal that brought San Francisco startup Triplebyte into fruition. 

Through the usage of coding quizzes and machine learning, the platform matches would-be employees with open jobs. After only a year - in which revenue grew three times (over $1 million monthly) and headcount doubled from 20 to 40 - it’s attracted funding from a raft of investors including Y Combinator.

Now, Triplebyte has announced that it’s raised $35 billion in series B financing led by YC Continuity, Y Combinator’s investment fund dedicated to supporting YC alumni companies in subsequent funding rounds, with participation from Founders Fund’s Brian Singerman, Caffeinated Capital, and Initialized Capital. As a part of the round — which brings Triplebyte’s total raised to roughly $48.1 million — Ali Rowghani, a veteran of Pixar and former Twitter COO, will join the board of directors.

CEO and Cofounder Harj Taggar said that the fresh capital will enable Triplebyte to expand beyond the Bay Area into Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and Boston later in the year.

“[My cofounders and I started] Triplebyte to solve the problem that every company now has to build their own software and they need to find engineers to do it,” said Taggar, a Y Combinator board of overseers member who previously founded auction and marketplace management company Auctomatic. “There’s not enough engineers graduating from traditionally well-known colleges to meet this demands, but those are the only places companies know to look for talent. The solution is creating a new credential that companies can use to find engineers from any background.”

Taggar’s partners — Ammon Bartram and Guillaume Luccisano, who helped to grow startup Socialcam to $100 million active users before Autodesk acquired it in 2012 for $60 million — say they personally experienced the kind of employer discrimination they hope to combat with Triplebyte’s toolset. Bartram was homeschooled and attended a small college, while Luccisano studied French at a technical school. After moving to Silicon Valley in 2010, they say they had to purposefully seek jobs at companies willing to hire engineers from nontraditional backgrounds, like Justin.tv (Twitch’s progenitor).

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