South African tech talent marketplace OfferZen has raised a EUR4.5 million (US$5.1 million) Series A funding round as it bids to deepen its expansion into European markets.
According to the TechCrunch platform, This is OfferZen’s first round of funding since Philip Joubert, Malan Joubert and Brett Jones founded the company in 2015.
As a tech talent marketplace, OfferZen allows software developers and engineers to sign up as candidates who are then curated by OfferZen and made available to companies. The developers are live on the marketplace for four weeks, during which OfferZen guarantees that they’ll get contacted by different companies.
OfferZen operated solely in South Africa for four and a half years until April 2020, when it expanded to the Netherlands after acquiring an Amsterdam-based recruitment tech startup called TryCatch.
According to OfferZen CEO Philip Joubert, over 1,000 companies and 100,000 software developers use the tech talent marketplace. Most of its customers from both ends of the marketplace are based in South Africa, the Netherlands, and parts of Europe like the U.K. and Germany, which are prominent hubs for global talent.
The expansion to the Netherlands and servicing parts of Europe contributed heavily to OfferZen’s growth in the second half of this year, experiencing a 29% increase in placements between Q3 and Q4 alone.
“Tech hiring came to a near standstill in the first half of 2020 due to COVID. Since then, however, we’ve seen a huge acceleration in the market — companies are now raising far more capital than they were pre-pandemic, investing more in technology and subsequently hiring much faster,”
the CEO said in a statement.
SOURCE: https://techcrunch.com/
