Five-year-old Eightfold AI, which aids big enterprises such as Air Asia, Tata Communications, Dolby, Nutanix, other people, employ and retain talent, has raised a new round of capital eight months following it raised $125 million in Series D funding. The startup has now secured $220 million in Series E funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Investors from earlier rounds which includes General Catalyst, Capital One Ventures, Foundation Capital, IVP, and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated in the new round. With the most current fund infusion, the startup’s valuation has more than doubled to $2.1 billion from $1 billion in Series D round, Ashutosh Garg, Co-founder and CEO, Eightfold.ai told TheSpuzz Online.
The enterprise will deploy the capital towards development of its artificial intelligence-based Talent Intelligence Platform and expand its companion ecosystem apart from expanding its India operations. The last and existing investment rounds have been raised amid the expanding and altering work atmosphere due to the pandemic. As a outcome, companies have been focusing on reskilling and upskilling programmes for their staff which is also amongst the important challenges for the international workforce at present.
“The pandemic has fueled the importance of managing talent in numerous ways. The most visible is that of remote work environments, which opens up talent to organizations that they might not have previously considered. It also places a premium on understanding what your employees are looking for out of their careers. They have many more options now because they can apply anywhere, so what are you (companies) doing to facilitate their growth to the next level?” added Garg.
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The enterprise has raised more than $410 million in funding so far, which includes the existing round, with $350 million coming in the last six months. “Powered by AI and machine learning, Eightfold’s platform provides global enterprises with a single solution for managing the entire talent lifecycle, including hiring, retaining, and growing a diverse global workforce,” stated Deep Nishar, Senior Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers.
According to Gartner, spending on SaaS applications by companies in India will develop by 20.8 per cent to $1.41 billion and 20.2 per cent to $1.69 billion in 2022. The finish-user spending on public cloud services in India will be worth $4.4 billion in 2021, up 31.4 per cent from 2020. Eightfold’s investment is the second deal involving Indian startups or Indian founders by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 announced in the last two days. On Tuesday, yet another application-as-a-service startup Whatfix, which aids companies improve user adoption of applications they use, had announced a $90 million round led by the second Vision Fund. Eightfold is the fourth startup with operations in India and/or other nations raising investment from the second fund following Lenskart and Meesho apart from Whatfix.