Karat: company research

Stage

Series C

Raised

$138M

Investors

Tiger Global, Norwest Venture Partners, 8VC, Exor, Base Partners, Sempervirens Fund

Website

1point3acres.com

Source: 1point3acres.com Source: techcrunch.com

Karat describes its offering as expert-led technical interviews combined with live AI-native simulations, aimed at evaluating "the AI-enabled engineer." The company says its trained interviewers assess every candidate the same way so that hiring data is comparable, and that leaders get interview performance data, competitive benchmarking across roles and geographies, and insights into how engineers solve problems and collaborate with AI. It reports having conducted over 600,000 technical interviews.

Karat's $110 million Series C, announced on October 13, 2021, valued the company at $1.1 billion and was led by Tiger Global, with Norwest Venture Partners, 8VC, Exor, Base Partners and Sempervirens Fund participating. The company said it planned to use the funding to build more technology and data science into its process, both to train and guide interviewers and to analyse the interviewing process. It also said it might later expand beyond technical hiring.

Karat says its interviews are conducted by "Interview Engineers" who are experienced engineers, and that the model has reclaimed one million hours back to engineers at client companies. According to TechCrunch, interviewers are contractors rather than full-time Karat employees, and the volume of interviews is such that some treat it as their primary income, with a number earning $250,000 annually. Karat also describes a team of "interview scientists" working to identify the ideal candidate interview, structured as modules that map to what a specific company is looking for.

Karat's president Jeffrey Spector describes the difficulty of designing interviews that identify underlying skills while keeping a wall around a client company's confidential or proprietary information, so that interviewers "are not learning every single thing." TechCrunch notes that Karat sits at the centre of how companies build new strategies and products, and that recruitment ads can leak information about what a company is secretly working on. The company also frames its work as responding to AI disrupting technical assessments and the roles of software engineers.

Karat positions itself as the "category creator and leader" in what it calls the human + technology Interviewing Cloud, a claim attributed to Tiger Global partner Scott Shleifer, who said most companies will hire engineers this way. The company presents its differentiator as a single consistent evaluation system that holds every engineer to the same enforced technical bar regardless of team, geography or vendor, and lets clients benchmark their talent against 600,000+ interviews from comparable companies.

• Mohit BhendeChief Executive Officer
• Jeffrey SpectorPresident

Source: karat.com

• Karat raises $110M on a $1.1B valuation to grow its technical interviewing-as-a-service platform

  TechCrunch, 2021-10-13