OfferZen secures €4.5m in Series A growth funding

Philip Joubert, cofounder of OfferZen

This is the first round of funding raised by OfferZen. The startup has been bootstrapped since its founding in 2015.

“Right now tech hiring is growing at a rate well beyond our wildest expectations. We’re seeing record numbers of both developers and companies signing up to use the OfferZen platform. We experienced a 29% increase in placements between the third and fourth quarter of 2021 alone,” says OfferZen co-founder and CEO Philip Joubert.

“Tech hiring came to a near standstill in the first half of 2020 due to Covid. Since then we’ve seen a huge acceleration in the market – companies are now raising far more capital than they were pre-pandemic, investing more in technology and subsequently hiring much faster. Access to top tech talent has become the bottleneck for many companies and we’re in a position to help companies solve that.”

Co-founded by brothers Philip and Malan Joubert, and Brett Jones, OfferZen expanded to the Netherlands in April 2020 after acquiring TryCatch, a recruitment tech startup based in Amsterdam.

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The company will invest in the local tech community and grow its operations, product and growth teams as it deepens its expansion into Europe, with the aim to expand to two additional countries in 2022. OfferZen focuses on building an engaged developer community through events, tech community sponsorships, content and developer reports. Developers are accepted onto OfferZen when they are ready to find a job, which means companies access developers who are ready-to-hire.

“We offer two payment models for companies: a pay-per-placement model with a once-off placement fee. Our second offering, the OfferZen Partner solution, is an annual subscription tailored to a company’s hiring plans. Developers do not pay to use the platform.

“We’ve achieved excellent product-market fit with our partner offering where companies pay upfront to make a set number of hires on the platform. Companies are typically quite hesitant to make upfront commitments for recruitment solutions, we need to demonstrate massive value for them to do so. So we’re very happy that hires made by companies on our partner product now constitute almost 40% of all placements we make. This allows us to attract some of the best talent as developers can access a constant flow of new job opportunities,” Joubert added.

“We’re aiming to offer South African and European companies the biggest pool of high-quality developers and the best experience for hiring them. With this investment, the massive growth in venture capital raised and the subsequent explosion of demand for tech talent, we believe the timing is right for us to double down on our vision,” Joubert concluded.