Karat pioneers the Interviewing Cloud to transform technical hiring with $110M funding

Karat, the company which has built what it calls the “Interviewing Cloud” — essentially, an “interviewing-as-a-service” platform that provides customers with a way to funnel candidates for online interviewers, is on a roll.

The company announced a $110 million Series C funding round at a $1.1 billion valuation.

Karat’s industry-defining human + technology solution delivers live technical interviews on behalf of clients 24/7 while forging deep strategic partnerships that unlock enormous value for engineering and talent acquisition leaders.

“We believe the interview status quo is deeply flawed, hindering the potential for individuals and organizations to truly thrive. Interviews are opportunities to change lives”, claims its website.

The company plans to use the funding to continue building more technology and data science into its process — both to train and guide the interviewers and to analyze the interviewing process to improve it in the future.

“Just like the public cloud moved everyone from private computing to shared infrastructure, Karat’s Interviewing Cloud is upending the old way of do-it-yourself interviewing that eats into valuable engineering time and fails to delight candidates,” said Mohit Bhende, Karat co-founder and CEO. “By professionalizing interviewing and developing purpose-built interviewing technology, Karat enables companies to innovate faster and candidates to showcase their strengths in a comfortable environment”.

Bhende states that the company trains the people based on the data that it sources from past interviews, which in theory gives it a stronger strike rate for identifying strong candidates.

However, Karat’s position that live, technical interviews were far superior to giving actual tests seemed still to be a subject for debate. One of the ways that the interviewing process has been compressed is to rely on tests, which Karat believes are not an accurate enough way to determine a candidate’s real-world problem-solving skills and ability to collaborate with others.

“We have a team of interview scientists trying to identify the perfect candidate interview,” said Jeffrey Spector, the president and the other co-founder of Karat. “We are a competency-driven company and so we are looking for underlying skills and questions that map to the perfect candidate.”

The expertise and data generated from hundreds of thousands of interviews also allow Karat to create more candidate-centric experiences, particularly for software engineers who have been previously overlooked by traditional hiring practices.

The fastest growing and largest enterprises such as Roblox, American Express, Intuit, Compass, and Wayfair trust Karat to expand hiring capacity, unlock developer time, and raise engineering quality so they can innovate and grow.

In the longer perspective, the company may look to bring in interviewers, skillsets, and data to grow beyond technical hiring.