Celential.ai Raises Series A Funding and Appoints New CEO to Accelerate Growth of Virtual Recruiter, its AI-powered Recruiting Service

Celential.ai, an emerging AI-powered virtual recruiting service, announced that it has secured $9.5M in Series A funding, led by GSR Ventures, with participation from Spider Capital, TSVC and select individual investors. As part of this funding, Amer Akhtar, former Yahoo! Small Business President and previous CEO of ADP China, joins Celential.ai as CEO after serving as a valued advisor.

Founded by Andrew Dong and Ilias Beshimov, who have now stepped into the roles of President and Chief Technology Officer, and Vice President of Product respectively, this funding comes as recurring revenue grew 7x in 2020, in spite of the macroeconomic climate in 2020. This round of funding propels the company’s explosive growth to accelerate in 2021, and advances the company’s mission to empower a frictionless talent recruiting experience by expanding its recruiting service capabilities, and operationalizing the business at scale.

“I am very pleased to welcome Amer to Celential.ai. He is an accomplished executive in Human Resources technology and has a demonstrated track record of outstanding business leadership that will be critical to Celential.ai’s success moving forward,” said Andrew Dong, Founder, President and Chief Technology Officer, Celential.ai. “Celential.ai is in a strong position to capitalize on the market opportunity and with the new funding and Amer’s leadership, we can accelerate the scaling of our business to help more customers find and develop the best talent.

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As hybrid work environments become the norm and the competition for talent heats up, hiring managers and HR business leaders require deep insight and efficient access to qualified passive candidates to improve hiring quality and shorten time-to-fill. Celential.ai’s Virtual Recruiter service uses precision matching and 360-degree mutual-fit assessment, simulating human experts, to match candidates to job openings from its graph of over three million software engineers in the U.S. and Canada. It then engages qualified candidates through AI-driven automated and personalized communication. The solution has already proven successful with numerous companies like Affinity, DiDi, Nylas, Paradigm and Twin Health.

“I am both humbled and delighted to join Celential.ai, and look forward to realizing our growing ambitions to create a best-in-class virtual recruiting service together with our partners at GSR Ventures, Spider Capital, TSVC and well-connected, accomplished individual investors,” said Amer Akhtar, CEO of Celential.ai. “Celential.ai’s sourcing service for software engineers is just the start of our vision. As we enter the next critical stage of our evolution as a company, this infusion of capital further validates the tremendous need and opportunity for AI to revolutionize recruiting and help fast growing companies with all of their hiring needs.”

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Customers Underscore the Value of an Intelligent Recruiting Service

“Leveraging Celential.ai’s passive candidate recruiting solution is the best investment we’ve made in recruiting. With their AI platform + human assistance, Celential.ai took nearly all of the overhead out of targeting the right candidates for us and lined up solid engineering candidates ready to interview with us within days of our engagement, resulting in a critical engineering leadership hire in little more than a month,” said Anand Gomes, CEO of Paradigm.

“Celential has helped us get in touch with phenomenal candidates much more quickly and easily. Thanks to Celential, we’ve been able to initiate great conversations and hire great people for our team,” said Stephani Martin, VP People at Affinity.

Investors Highlight the Critical Need for an AI-backed Service to Find and Recruit High-Quality Candidates Quickly 

“The pandemic has accelerated a seismic shift in the way businesses identify, recruit and manage talent,” said Richard Lim, co-founder and Managing Director of GSR Ventures. “Recruiting currently is inefficient, expensive and frustrating for both hiring managers and for talent. Finding high quality candidates quickly and effectively requires new technology-enabled approaches for high-accuracy matching and candidate engagement.  We are thrilled to put our support behind the Celential.ai team and their AI-backed service to help businesses solve today’s recruiting challenges.”

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