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I am thrilled to announce that our Work-Bench portfolio company RippleMatch has raised a $23.5M funding round led by Invus Opportunities.
Behind this exciting headline, I want to share some of the untold grit and creativity behind RippleMatch’s journey that led to this milestone.
When we invested in RippleMatch back in 2019, it was behind the thesis that the traditional career fair system was not only broken, but biased. While career fairs were still the status quo for many companies, in speaking with our greater Work-Bench network, many forward thinking companies had already realized they could not meet all of their talent and diversity goals by recruiting from the same 10 colleges they were accustomed to visiting. They needed to dramatically rethink how they connected with early career candidates throughout the country.
RippleMatch’s early-career recruiting platform enables companies to source from a curated pool of diverse, qualified candidates in less time and at lower cost than traditional collegiate recruiting programs.
All was going to plan, as RippleMatch signed on and worked with a roster of impressive enterprise customers who also believed in this transformation, brought on a world class team, and marched forward on product.
Then March 2020 hit. Recruiting (and much else) came to a complete halt due to the pandemic. It was a very scary time for everyone, but for RippleMatch, their core business was shaken and jeopardized.
What came next can only be described as the definition of grit. While their customers were figuring out what would become of recruiting, RippleMatch realized this was a tremendous opportunity to bring these recruiters together and form a community around open, honest discussion on how to overcome the current environment. They hosted COVID-19 & Recruiting Community Chats and their first ever Virtual Summit, which brought together hundreds of recruiters. In doing all of this, they got closer to the customer voice than ever.
Most of all, the RippleMatch team doubled down on their product. Now, RippleMatch’s intelligent platform for early career hiring serves as the central operating system for recruitment teams. The platform uses data to automate and streamline candidate sourcing, diversity recruitment, recruitment marketing, employer branding, virtual events, and recruiting analytics. This all-in-one platform only gets more and more powerful, with more candidates, data, and automation.
RippleMatch’s grit has not only paid off, as they navigated the turbulent waters of 2020, but set them up stronger than ever.
The pandemic has completely changed the name of the game for recruiting, and RippleMatch is now leading the transformation as virtual recruiting is no longer a niche, but the new norm moving forward.
Moreover, the tremendous winds of repairing racial injustice in America have further shown that diversity in companies cannot just be PR, but has to be concrete and measurable. RippleMatch’s customer list of leading Fortune 500 employers including Amazon, SAP, PNC, General Mills, Dell, and eBay have all agreed. They help to connect over one million job seekers with career opportunities across the U.S, reach 55x more schools, and create applicant pools that mirror the US population. And they are only just getting started.
Behind the glamour and big headlines has been a tremendous amount of grit by the whole RippleMatch team, and we couldn’t be more excited to continue to partner on RippleMatch’s transformative vision to unlock access and opportunity for millions of people.
