Jumpstart raises $8.5M in new funding towards diverse recruitment

Diversity and inclusion are major foundations to building a healthy and functional workforce, and companies are catching on.

Now a startup that’s built a recruitment platform to help organizations source and hire in a more holistic way is announcing a round of funding to capitalise on a rise in demand for its services. 

Jumpstart, which provides a way for organizations to tap into a wider pool of candidates, who themselves have been more carefully ordered by way of Jumpstart’s algorithms, is announcing that it has raised $8.5 million.

The company today focuses primarily on filling entry/early-stage roles in “knowledge worker” positions such as engineering internships, junior-level marketing roles and business analysts. Founder and CEO Ben Herman said in an interview that the plan will be to continue moving up the funnel to target an ever-wider range of experiences and jobs. To date, the company has helped place people with big-name firms like Akamai, Adobe, Twitch, Lyft, Pinterest and many more.

The Series A is being led by storied VC firm Sequoia Capital, with participation from Michael Lynton, the chairman of Snapchat’s parent Snap Inc.; and Joshua Steiner, the co-chairman of commodity trading firm Castleton Commodities International LLC. Those names and affiliations, significantly, speak to what kinds of power holders are looking at the challenge of diversity and inclusion in hiring, not just who is investing in trying to fix it.

“Almost every company at scale manages early-career recruiting differently than industry recruiting. That’s because the techniques for identifying great early-career talent are just different than folks with a decade of experience. We think there’s an opportunity for Jumpstart to be a global platform for early-career talent,”

Mike Vernal, Partner, Sequoia

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