Karat, online interview platform for engineer work, acquires $28M in new funding

Engineering experience is in great demand as more companies venture online and require more technically-skilled employees. A new company has recently finished a fund raising round to help create a platform that'll assist in that search so it is quicker and easier.

Karat — which takes on the process of technical interviewing on behalf of clients like Citrix, Roblox, InVision and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative by connecting already sourced candidates with live engineers to interview, test and evaluate the candidates for the next step of the recruitment process — has raised $28 million in funding, a growth round that is being led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from previous backers Norwest Venture Partners and Joe Lonsdale’s firm 8VC.

The company is not disclosing its valuation, but this latest round brings the total raised to $41 million, and in the last round, Karat had a modest valuation of $55 million, according to data in PitchBook. Given that the company has grown by quite a bit since then — it tripled the number of interviews conducted last year and will triple again this year; and while it doesn’t disclose the total number of clients or interviews, it says the biggest will run 10,000 interviews in a year through Karat — I’m guessing the valuation is now over $100 million, but possibly lower than $200 million.

Karat is taking an interesting approach to a problem that many others are chasing: how best to leverage the growth of tech tools to improve the antiquated hiring process, which had been one of the earliest verticals to get the dot-com treatment (many flash-in-the-pan, and some huge online job sites being rife in the first dot-com boom), but has seen surprisingly little innovation since then.

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