Zipping Right Along...ZipRecruiter Raises $63 Million From IVP To Accelerate Growth

Great companies are often started by founders who are trying to solve a simple personal pain point. Within the IVP portfolio alone, you can see many such examples. Reed Hastings got fed up with paying exorbitant late fees for video rentals and today we have Netflix. Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy wanted a less permanent means to communicate with friends and launched Snapchat. As parents of young children, Jessica Alba and Brian Lee insisted on safer products for their families and today household goods from The Honest Company are filling homes everywhere. For Ian Siegel, Joe Edmonds, Ward Poulos and Will Redd, frustrating and time-consuming experiences as hiring managers led them to create ZipRecruiter, a fast and easy to use HR hiring platform that helps employers distribute their jobs across the web. Four years after ZipRecruiter’s founding, IVP is proud to partner with Ian, Joe, Ward and Will by leading a $63 million Series A financing.

The recruiting industry began its transition from offline to online almost as soon as the Internet was commercialized – so why would a venture capital firm invest in a recruiting company now? Well…

• ZipRecruiter is led by passionate founders supported by a fantastic team: Ian, Joe, Ward and Will felt the pain of hiring new employees first hand through their prior experiences at start ups. They felt there had to be a better way for small and medium sized businesses to manage their job postings across the web (and ultimately build out their own work forces) and left their jobs to co-found and start ZipRecruiter. Along the way, they have attracted over 100 passionate, talented employees to join a company with a fantastic culture.
• The market is large and under-served: While ZipRecruiter’s product suite can serve companies of all sizes, the core customer is a small or medium sized business. According to the Small Business Administration, there are roughly 6 million businesses in the US that have less than 500 employees and these businesses collectively employ approximately 120 million people, or roughly 50% of the US workforce. By providing an efficient and flexible subscription product, ZipRecruiter makes it job distribution and candidate management easy for employers that might otherwise find an enterprise-class software platform to be both cumbersome and expensive. For candidates, ZipRecruiter’s proprietary matching technology greatly streamlines the process of finding a new job.
• ZipRecruiter’s growth and financial performance is outstanding: Simply because it has been bootstrapped for four years certainly does not mean that ZipRecruiter has been a slow growth entity. Indeed, as IVP learned more, we were blown away by ZipRecruiter’s pace of growth and consistent profitability. Founders and management have built an entity that has more than doubled revenue annually since inception (and is on pace to do so again in 2014). With no external backing, ZipRecruiter has grown into an explosive company with a proven, sustainable business model and exceptional financial discipline.

IVP is honored to join the ZipRecruiter team for the next phase of the company’s growth. What can you expect from ZipRecruiter going forward? We hope much more of the same – effective and easy to use products, satisfied customers and excited employees!