TestGorilla raises $10m Seed round to help companies hire the best talent

● The pre-employment assessment platform helps companies hire the best talent while removing unconscious bias

● Just nine months since its launch TestGorilla is already working with more than 1,500 businesses 

● Clients include the NHS, Sony, PepsiCo, and Bain & Company

● Round led by Notion Capital, joined by Partech and Jeff Weiner’s Next Play Ventures 

The pandemic has led to a fundamental shift in how businesses hire new talent and the roles they recruit for, making talent acquisition harder than ever before. As a result, recruiters are increasingly focusing on skills and intrinsic motivation rather than resumes and experience. It’s in this context that HR tech startup TestGorilla raised $10m in Seed funding to help businesses identify better talent.
The funding will be used to further develop TestGorilla’s proprietary technology and grow the test library to cover more job skills, improving TestGorilla’s ability to predict job success. Additionally, the company will focus on growth within its current core markets and international expansion.
Launched in 2020 by serial entrepreneur, Wouter Durville, and former Bain & Company Partner, Otto Verhage, TestGorilla is already working with more than 1,500 businesses including the NHS, Sony, PepsiCo, and Bain & Company, helping them hire better, more diverse, talent. 
TestGorilla’s platform enables organisations to remotely assess all factors relating to job success for the candidate, such as cognitive abilities, soft skills, specific job skills, culture fit, motivation, and language proficiency. It replaces CV screening, which is simply not correlated with job success at all.  
Wouter Durville, Co-Founder of TestGorilla said: “It’s unacceptable that only a quarter of the world’s workforce is in their dream job.  Archaic hiring practices and unconscious bias have long fed into this problem as historically companies rank candidates based on their CVs and gut instinct. TestGorilla, however, enables companies to rank candidates based on solid data, gathered through our relevant testing exercises. 
By developing our platform and growing our library of smart screening tests, we are making it easier for hiring managers – across industries and job roles – to make a fast, informed decision on a candidate based on the most important criteria. TestGorilla’s assessments  highlight high-potential candidates, many of which they may not have been considered on the basis of their CV. It also puts an end to costly mis-hires.”
The $10m funding round was led by leading European SaaS venture capital firm, Notion Capital, joined by global VC firm Partech, Jeff Weiner´s Next Play Ventures, and a group of high-profile HR tech entrepreneurs, including Indeed co-founder Paul Forster, Peakon co-founder Phil Chambers, and Justworks co-founder Isaac Oates.
Jos White, General Partner at Notion Capital says: “People are at the centre of any successful business and yet the ability to find the best people is more challenging than ever. Companies are moving to more of a remote way of working at least in part to give them more pools of talent to hire from. At the same time companies are prioritising a more intentional approach to diversity and inclusion. TestGorilla fits perfectly with this rapidly changing environment with a platform that removes barriers and biases, and enables companies to find the people who are the very best match for a role wherever they are.”
Boris Golden, Partner at Partech adds: “Building a slick, simple, yet powerful one-stop-shop platform for pre-hiring tests is spot-on and extremely valuable. It indeed leads to radically better hires and a much more efficient recruitment process. It's also exactly the right time to make it happen, with the growing digitization of (remote) hiring and the widespread awareness about the impact of unconscious biases. We're absolutely thrilled to partner with Wouter & Otto, who are on a genuine mission to tackle these major business and societal issues – creating a whole new product category!”
Jeff Weiner, Founding Partner of Next Play Ventures, concludes: “Talent is distributed equally, but opportunity is not. TestGorilla is a purpose-driven company that is helping to level the playing field when it comes to hiring. We’re excited to be working with TestGorilla to help them realise their vision.”

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About TestGorilla
TestGorilla is an online assessment platform with asynchronous video interviewing functionality. The company’s remote team serves recruiters, HR professionals, hiring managers, and hiring teams in more than 100 countries. TestGorilla is registered in the Netherlands.

About Notion Capital
Notion Capital is a European B2B SaaS and Cloud VC with more than $700m assets under management, with more than 80 investments to date. The Notion team founded, built and exited two highly successful SaaS businesses - Star and MessageLabs - and invests exclusively in exceptional founders with the ambition to build global category leaders. The Notion portfolio includes Currencycloud, Dixa, GoCardless, Mews, Paddle, Tradeshift and Unbabel. Notion is also the founder of Included VC, the venture capital fellowship for individuals from diverse and overlooked communities from around the world.

About Partech
Born in San Francisco and Paris, Partech is one of the most active VCs in the world. Its team of former entrepreneurs and tech operators from 20 nationalities brings together capital, operational experience and strategic support for entrepreneurs at seed, venture and growth stages. In 2020, Partech invested in 82 startups across 24 countries in Europe, America, Africa and Asia.

About Next Play Ventures
Next Play Ventures is an early-stage venture capital fund founded by Jeff Weiner, former CEO of LinkedIn. Along with Managing Director Brian Rumao, their mission is to coach entrepreneurial leaders building world-class, purpose-driven companies. Investments include Figma, Brex, Scale, Notion, and Common Room.