Matrix India backs recruitment service GrownOut

The company was set up in 2003 by Sumit Gupta, a computer science graduate who previously worked for a number of start-ups in the training and education space, and Harsimran Walia, formerly of Oracle and McAfee. With backing from early-stage investor Outbox Ventures, the first version of GrownOut was launched in March 2014. It is currently used by companies including Quikr, Ola, Appiterate and Stayzilla.

"The recruitment market in India is large and has traditionally been served by staffing agencies, job-boards and career sites. However, HR heads of companies still struggle with a barrage of unsuitable resumes, long recruitment cycles and candidates that are a poor-fit with company culture," said Tarun Davda, director at Matrix India, in a statement.

The VC firm believes there are several opportunities to solve this problem and it plans to make multiple investments in the space. Referral hiring is said to represent the "holy grail of recruitment," resulting in shorter hiring cycles, lower hiring costs and higher employee retention.

The new capital will be used to deepen GrownOut's analytics expertise as well as for product development and business growth.

Matrix India has INR30 billion ($488 million) under management and invests in consumer-focused companies at the seed, early and early growth stages. It is part of the global Matrix network of funds that has $3 billion under management in the US, China and India.

Recent India investments include Alchemy Web Private, operator of online food-ordering platform LimeTray, and mobile game developer Red Monster Games.

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• Topics
• Venture
• Early-stage
• Technology
• South Asia
• TMT
• Venture
• Matrix Partners
• India