TestGorilla secures $70M Series A to help companies eliminate hiring bias

The online skills-assessment platform used by Sony, PepsiCo, Bain and Oracle aims to revolutionize post-Covid recruitment and replace CVs

Amsterdam, June 14th 2022 - The online skills assessment platform TestGorilla announced today that it has secured $70M in Series A funding, co-led by the London-based venture capital firms Atomico and Balderton Capital. Today’s funding brings the company’s total investment to $80M following previous investment from Notion, Partech, and CapitalT. Luca Eisenstecken from Atomico and James Wise from Balderton Capital will join the board as part of this investment round. 

TestGorilla has attracted more than 5,000 customers, less than two years since its launch in summer 2020. These include Sony, PepsiCo, Bain & Company, Oracle, Revolut, H&M and the UK’s National Health Service. G2, the world’s largest software marketplace, recently named TestGorilla in its prestigious list of the top five fastest-growing software products for 2022.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Wouter Durville and former Bain & Company partner Otto Verhage, TestGorilla makes the recruitment process more fair, efficient, and data-driven by enabling organizations to use skills assessments as soon as candidates apply for open roles.

“Too often, the recruitment process requires hiring managers to spend hours screening unreliable, incomplete, subjective CVs,” says TestGorilla’s co-founder Wouter Durville. “

By replacing resumes with more than 220 scientifically validated tests, our platform helps to eliminate hiring bias, creating a level playing field where every candidate can compete on equal terms.”

TestGorilla is leading the way in skills-based hiring – an increasingly popular way to recruit thatgives every candidate an equal chance to prove their abilities and motivation. Adoptingskills-based hiring helps businesses recruit top talent and more diverse candidates, faster, easierand with less risk of bias. Studies show that job success is most strongly correlated withmulti-measure assessments, whereas CVs and work experience are the weakest links.

The TestGorilla platform caters to this by offering organizations hundreds of pre-employmenttests that enable them to tailor their candidate search to their exact requirements. Areascovered by the assessments range from quantitative skills to cognitive ability, enablingprospective employees to compete on merit rather than background.
“Finding the right people is increasingly challenging for even the world’s best brands, and thepandemic has opened employer eyes to huge untapped pools of global talent,” says Atomico’spartner Luca Eisenstecken. “TestGorilla is seeing incredible growth with its automated,data-driven approach to solving this problem. And they’re doing this while delivering a fairerhiring process based on skills rather than resumes, eliminating the biases that prejudice decision making."

“Our portfolio companies hire more than 10,000 people a year and across the board, they havebeen looking for ways to remove bias while giving candidates the best hiring experience. It’sclear that traditional hiring practices have failed on both these fronts, and that this has onlybeen exacerbated by Covid-19 and the rise of remote hiring,” says James Wise, partner atBalderton Capital. “We've already seen TestGorilla become wildly popular within our portfolioas a more effective and fair way to identify people with the right skills for the role, and we'reexcited to support the team on their mission to end the era of CV-based candidate screening.”

Using the funding to expand its test library and its team
TestGorilla’s platform enables companies to save valuable time and avoid expensive mis-hires byremotely assessing all the factors that contribute to job success, such as specific role-relatedskills, language proficiency, cognitive abilities, soft skills, personality, motivation and culture add.
The ongoing development of TestGorilla’s proprietary technology will include the platform’sintegration with further Applicant Tracking Systems, enabling employers to use the productseamlessly from within their existing ATS, and the introduction of new features to satisfy therequirements of mid-sized businesses. The platform’s test library continues to expand, with theexisting 220-plus tests due to be joined by a further 100 by the end of 2022. The company alsoexpects to hire 100 new employees in the coming year.

About TestGorilla
TestGorilla is an online pre-employment testing platform with a wide-ranging library of morethan 220 scientifically validated tests. These can be used to assess candidates’ skills in specificjob-related skills, language proficiency, cognitive abilities, motivation, personality and cultureadd. The company’s global remote team serves recruiters, HR professionals, hiring managers,and hiring teams in more than 100 countries. TestGorilla is registered in the Netherlands.

About Atomico
Atomico is a venture capital firm partnering with today’s boldest founders to solve the future’sbiggest challenges. That means we provide access to capital to a progressive and diversefounder base, share operational excellence to supercharge their growth, and partner with themon their scale-up journey. We feel a responsibility to shape a better ecosystem for the nextgeneration, to ensure ideas the world needs are brought to life.Founded in 2006, Atomico has partnered with 112 ambitious teams, including 23 billion-dollarcompanies. Our team of 35 growth experts from Twitter, Google, Skype, Wise and more supportleaders across the portfolio, which includes Supercell, Stripe, Graphcore, Klarna, Lilium, MessageBird, Masterclass, Gympass and Pipedrive.

About Balderton
Balderton Capital is a leading venture capital firm focused on backing the bestEuropean-founded technology companies. In the two decades since its founding, Balderton hasworked with hundreds of extraordinary founders and has raised $4.5bn across ten funds tosupport businesses at both early and growth stages.
Previous investments include Depop (Etsy), Digital Surgery (Medtronic), Frontier Car Group (OLXGroup), Flywire (NASDAQ: FLYW), Nutmeg (JPMorgan Chase), Peakon (Workday), Recorded Future(Insight Partners), Sunrise (Microsoft), Talend (NASDAQ: TLND), and Yoox Net-a-Porter (BIT:YNAP). Balderton’s current portfolio includes Aircall, Beauty Pie, Carwow, Citymapper,Contentful, ComplyAdvantage, Darktrace (LSE: DARK), Dream Games, GoCardless, Graphcore,Healx, Infarm, Kobalt Music, Labster, Lendable, Prodigy Finance, Revolut, Sophia Genetics(NASDAQ:SOPH), Tessian, THG (LSE: THG), VanMoof, Vestiaire Collective, and Zego.