Yesterday, Gild announced that they just closed on $8 million in additional financing. According to AllThingsD:
Gild will announce that it has landed an $8 million series A round of venture capital funding led by Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures. Prior investors in Gild’s seed round also participated. They include SAP Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners and investor Mark Kvamme, best known for his early stake in LinkedIn.
This brings the total amount financed by Gild to $12.4 million according to CrunchBase. In its press release yesterday, Gild said they would use the additional financing to, “expand the science backing its offerings, accelerate product innovation and meet rising customer demand.”
Last June, Marvin Smith wrote a piece here on SourceCon about Gild that said it could help you achieve Moneyball sourcing:
Sheeroy Desai and his team at Gild are offering a platform for technical sourcing that is very intriguing. Gild Source, when completed, is expected to have over 5 million profiles of software developers and engineers that will reflect hobbies, interests, work history, social graphs and a scoring of their technical abilities—everything a technical sourcer or recruiter needs.
Like, the baseball Moneyball counterparts, Sheeroy offers a different perspective or thinking when it comes to evaluating target talent. In baseball, Moneyball thinking moved from a “gut feeling” to measuring actual performance and putting that information (data) into a useable format. In sourcing, instead of looking primarily at the schools, companies and titles of the individuals, this Moneyball approach analyzes the target audience’s software code and scores their technical competence. Sheeroy explains, “Great developers are really deep in programming languages and have a breath of languages. They spend their free time coding, writing, dabbling and trying to pick up new languages. Gild Source focuses on grabbing all the relevant data and aggregating and scoring the right information. Ultimately, we want our customers to know who (target talent) they are, what interests them, and when is the right time to call them.”
While other notable standalone competitors like TalentBin and Entelo haven’t reached this level of reported financing, Gild’s big series A take may pave the way for them–if they want it.
While the money is great for the overall sourcing ecosystem, outside financing can be both a blessing and a curse for the company that takes it. You can invest more in your company’s offerings but you could be limited later on when investors demand a return.
At the very least though, this shows that there is keen investor interest in smart and savvy sourcing tools. And given that tech talent is in high need in investor-happy Silicon Valley, it should be no surprise that the focus is on tools like Gild right now.
What excites me most, as a biased observer of course, is that this helps open up more startup activity in the sourcing world. That means more seed rounds and angel investments that involve sourcing startups because there is a possibility of even more funding with the promise of success.
For any sourcer who likes having cool, new tools to play with, you should be pleased with this news. More cool tools are coming. And that’s something I can (a little bit selfishly) get behind.