OfferZen, a South African IT talent marketplace, has secured EUR 4.5 million (US $5.1 million) in a Series A fundraising round to expand into European markets.
OfferZen, situated in Cape Town, was founded in 2015 and debuted in 2016. It assists tech firms such as Luno, Absa, MMI Holdings, Takealot, WeTransfer, Adyen, and Catawiki in hiring from a community of over 100 000 software creators.
After purchasing TryCatch, an Amsterdam-based recruiting tech firm, the company grew to become South Africa’s biggest tech talent marketplace, and expanded to the Netherlands in April 2020. After collecting EUR4.5 million (US$5.1 million) in Series A expansion finance from Base Capital, a South African investment firm, it now wants to expand further throughout Europe.
OfferZen has been bootstrapped since its inception in 2015, and this is the company’s first round of outside finance. The funds will be used to assist OfferZen to invest in the local tech community as well as expanding its operations, product, and growth teams as it expands across Europe, with the goal of expanding to two more nations by 2022.
“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 per cent increase in placements between the third and fourth quarter of 2021 alone,” said OfferZen co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Philip Joubert.
“Tech hiring came to a near standstill in the first half of 2020 due to COVID-19. 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.”
