A San Mateo, California-based online recruitment marketplace, Remotebase raised $2.1 million in pre-series A fundraising at a $65 million value.
Along with Draper Associates, Soma Capital, Angel Squad, and angel investors from Redis and Careem, the round was co-led by Indus Valley Capital and Hustlefund Ventures.
The startup will broaden its market reach with the new funding. The Covid-19 epidemic played a significant role in the creation of Remotebase. When the crisis drove the founders of Qasim Salam and Talha Masood to close two start-ups they had founded in their native Pakistan to service US clientele, they turned misfortune into opportunity.
Salam remembers, “We faced a true problem, but the last thing we wanted to do was fire the talented employees amid the pandemic because they all had families who were reliant on them financially.” We frantically sent emails to all of our Silicon Valley friends to check if anyone needed a software engineer and to see if our developers would be a good fit.
What Salam and Masood had not appreciated was that the pandemic would send a demand for remote working engineers into a boom – particularly for the high-quality engineers they employed. The realization came suddenly. We realized that we needed to refocus our operations on hiring.
In the past two years, Remotebase has carried out precisely that. Currently, it employs over 60,000 software engineers. New hires go through a series of tests, trials, and interviews before they are put into the database; each one is rigorously vetted so that the organization is aware of their skills and specialties.
As a result, unlike other recruitment networks where people frequently self-certify their talents, Remotebase can give its clients access to a much more carefully selected set of software engineers. They choose the ideal applicant for the position when requests from clients—mostly quickly expanding Californian technology companies—come in.
It’s high-value work; to date, the business has put about 100 engineers in prestigious positions, earning significant commissions. The $2.1 million fund-raise announced today will be used to create Talently, a new service that the founders believe will allow them to expand their market reach.
Image Credit: Remotebase
