As your company grows, there comes the point where you realize you need to build out the team to manage the flourishing business effectively. Yet the thought of managing a convoluted hiring process and putting in the time to recruit the proper team may seem like it’s not worth short term effort and time drain that you need to put in initially. Recognizing this pain point is Fetcher. It’s an AI-powered recruitment platform that allows companies to recruit talent at 20x less cost than hiring an agency to do the same work using an automated outbound strategy. Built from personal experience from the founders of Pixable, Fetcher is focused on introducing efficiencies into recruitment through its managed search platform so that companies can focus on their core businesses and not just building their teams. Already the company is working with 400+ high-growth companies such as Peloton, DigitalOcean, and Equinox.
AlleyWatch sat down with CEO and cofounder to learn more about Fetcher, its future plans, and most recent round of funding, which brings its total funding to $6.8M.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
$5.4M round of funding led by Accomplice and Slow Ventures.
Tell us about the product or service that Fetcher offers.
Fetcher is recruiting reimagined. We combine AI with a team of human recruiters to help companies fill open roles at a 20x cost advantage over agencies. With our human-in-the-loop approach to automated recruiting, we’ve helped hundreds of companies including Peloton, Paperless Post, AppNexus and Equinox and more.
What inspired you to start Fetcher?
We built Fetcher to solve our own hiring needs. At my last startup, Pixable, we were desperate to find good engineering talent in Manhattan. Accomplishing that was incredibly time-consuming and expensive. I could spend $20-30k per hire with agencies, or, spend hours and hours searching for interesting candidates online (not to mention trying to convince them to join my startup). In the end, even though I was able to find amazing people, it was as inefficient as it was impracticable and, quite frankly, poor use of my (or anyone else’s) time! The fact that neither myself nor my cofounders come from an HR background has enabled us to look at the problem of recruiting with a fresh perspective.
How is Fetcher different?
At Fetcher, we believe the best person for a job is often already engaged in their work. You have to proactively recruit them. That’s what’s unique about Fetcher. We make that process of finding great talent, wherever they may be, easy and automated. Fetcher is a “managed search” platform as opposed to a “self-directed search” tool like most AI-powered recruiting tools you see in the market. Self-directed tools still require a recruiter to have deep domain expertise with any role they are trying to fill. It also requires them to spend countless hours unearthing and reaching out to candidates.
Fetcher does all the heavy lifting so that recruiters and hiring managers can spend time doing what they do best – creating an amazing candidate experience. People-leaders love Fetcher because it allows their teams to automate their outbound recruiting. They can literally recruit in their sleep and spend their valuable time on the more important aspects of hiring.
What market does Fetcher target and how big is it?
We are targeting the $130B recruiting market.
What’s your business model?
We are a SaaS company. We charge per open position, per month and there’s no success fee. This approach translates into a 20x cost advantage over agencies and a 10x cost advantage over hiring additional in-house talent.
Who do you admire in the startup world and why?
We admire mission-driven companies who are addressing the world’s toughest challenges. Some that come to mind are Memphis Meats, Planet and Flatiron Health.
What was the funding process like?
We weren’t looking to raise a round when it came about, actually. We were heads down, focused on improving the product, when TJ reached out after having heard of us from portfolio companies that were using our product. We met a few times, he liked our approach and we moved quickly to a term sheet. Around that time we were also talking to Sam Lessin, who was working on Fin. He held a similar view that the way to automate certain complex cognitive tasks was to combine human intuition with AI search technology. That led to us inviting Slow to participate in the round.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
There are certain disadvantages in having an investor give you a term sheet without running a process. You don’t go to the market to validate proper terms and, sometimes, you can have less leverage when negotiating. On the other hand, since the investor is trying to preempt a round, they know that there has to be some premium built-in there.
There are certain disadvantages in having an investor give you a term sheet without running a process. You don’t go to the market to validate proper terms and, sometimes, you can have less leverage when negotiating. On the other hand, since the investor is trying to preempt a round, they know that there has to be some premium built-in there.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
We are extremely capital efficient and have passionate customers who are eager to speak on our behalf. Our investors also see the unique market opportunity. Just as sales and marketing were transformed over the last decade by data-driven technologies, recruitment is undergoing its own transformation thanks to emerging data and analytics technologies. Automation, metrics and big data are now the hallmarks of intelligent recruitment and hiring. This is transforming old recruiting paradigms and changing the way companies now find employees.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Scale our sales, data science, and engineering teams.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Focus on building a world-class product or service. When you build something that actually serves your customers, and you focus maniacally on their needs, everything has a way of working out for the best. Your customers will sell on your behalf and your revenue can finance your growth.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We will continue to make advances leveraging our own data so that we can provide specific, tactical insights on messaging and candidate targeting in a tailored manner. This will help companies hire smarter and faster and give our clients the tools and insights they need to build diverse and inclusive workplaces. Ultimately, we want to elevate the role of hiring to the most important task a company can undertake.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
El Almacen in Williamsburg
