Bangalore-based Zwayam Digital Pvt. Ltd, which runs an online recruitment platform targeting small and medium businesses under the same brand name, has raised $250,000 (around Rs 1.7 crore) in seed investment from a bunch of unnamed angel investors.
The startup plans to use the capital raised to expand its services to other cities in India and to international markets, starting with Southeast Asia and Middle East. It also plans to enhance technological infrastructure to improve its artificial intelligence capabilities, Nicel KM, co-founder and COO of Zwayam, told Techcircle.in.
Zwayam is an 'intelligent' recruitment engine for small and medium businesses, helping them market their jobs and reach out to candidates. It also offers profile recommendations to companies.
The firm was launched in August 2015 by Joseph John, who was previously a general manager at Wipro, heading work force analytics and talent acquisition, and Nicel, who worked as director of software engineering at Novell in the past.
Nicel claimed that the service is used by 150 companies currently, with over 1,100 jobs listed on the platform. He also said over 28,000 job applications have been processed through the platform so far.
The cloud-based SaaS solution is offered on a subscription-based model wherein customers can start free and upgrade to paying modes based on the number of active jobs and value-added services they access.
SaaS firms have been one of the preferred investment areas among investors. According to market intelligence firm IDC, global SaaS software revenues are expected to hit $106 billion in 2016. It has predicted that SaaS workloads will account for nearly 59% of the total cloud workloads by 2018, a 41% increase from 2013.
Startups in the HR services and recruitment space have also been attracting considerable investor interest. Mumbai-based AasaanJobs Pvt. Ltd, which runs an online recruitment marketplace for blue-collar workers, raised $5 million (around Rs 34 crore) in Series A funding from Aspada Advisors, IDG Ventures and Inventus Capital in February this year.
In January 2016, Indian Angel Network (IAN) member and angel investor Abhinav Mathur invested an undisclosed amount in seed funding in Noida-based Talentiser Labs that runs recruitment app Jobick.
In October 2015, Talent retention and analytics firm Jombay Pvt. Ltd raised an undisclosed amount in a second round of funding from VentureWorks India and Nikunj Jhaveri, chairman of Systems Plus.
In September 2015, recruitment and training platform Capabiliti raised $393,000 (Rs 2.6 crore) from angel investors including Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal; Freshdesk founder Girish Mathrubootham; Google India head Rajan Anandan; QikPod founder and CEO Ravi Gururaj; Indifi Technologies co-founder and CEO Alok Mittal and others.
Bangalore-based recruitment startup Belong.co had raised $5 million (Rs 32 crore) in a Series A round of funding led by Matrix Partners along with Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal in June last year.