Companies often struggle to make their career pages stand out — how many different ways can you write your company values or wax lyrical about ping pong tables? SaaS startup Teamtailor wants to fix this by offering the complete recruitment process on its platform.
With 6,000 customers on board and predicted profitability for the first half of this year, Teamtailor is today announcing a €10m funding round led by the London-based VC Sprints Capital. The round values the company, which has been more or less entirely bootstrapped to this point, at €325m.
From bootstrapped angle to fundraising
Cofounders Erik Andersson, David Wennergren and Richard Johansson have grown their business steadily without much outside capital, a fundraising stance informed by working together at PR-tech company Mynewsdesk, one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in Sweden. The majority of the business's growth has been financed from operating revenues.
“With our previous experience of company building [through VC], we felt that we couldn’t do it in the way we wanted and people far away from the day-to-day business wanted to poke around. This meant that we were early set on building Teamtailor in our own way,” Andersson says.
Two years ago, it raised its first institutional capital — €5m (still mostly untouched) — also from Sprints Capital. The Swedish-founded, London-based VC is known to be less controlling than some other VCs and has previously invested in startups like Swedish SaaS Planhat, British fintech unicorn Revolut and Lithuanian online fashion marketplace Vinted.
Now with new CEO Sara Arildsson (former COO at iZettle) and an additional €10m in the bank, Teamtailor is planning to focus on international expansion, especially in the US.
But with a near doubling of net revenue in one year to €17m in 2021 and no urgent need for new capital, why fundraise at all?
“We’ve seen continued growth in all areas of our business and, whilst we didn’t need this extra funding to operate, this new investment puts us in an even stronger financial position and allows us to move faster on opportunities as we see them,” says Arildsson.
So far Teamtailor has over 240 employees, with offices in Stockholm, London, Austin and Auckland.
What does Teamtailor do differently?
There isn’t a lack of recruitment tech startups — in Europe, there's a flurry of them. There's also a range of recruitment applicant trackers and recruiting software available.
Teamtailor puts the latter two together, combining an applicant tracking system with an interactive career website to improve companies’ recruitment processes, attract the best talent and manage candidates.
“When we set up Teamtailor we had found that all the other platforms were solely designed for the administrative part of HR — sort and handle. We believed we could build something that also focused on relationship building,” Andersson says.
According to Arildsson, half of Teamtailor’s new customers come via recommendations from existing customers and it's more than doubled its customer base since the end of 2020. With the war for talent still raging, it’s no wonder that companies are looking for solutions.
