Recruitment automation Kula raises $12 million in seed funding for expansion in R&D

Recruitment automation platform Kula has raised $12 million in a seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital India and Australia-based Square Peg Capital, the startup said on August 31.

The round also saw participation from existing investors Venture Highway and Together Fund and some existing angel investors.

The firm plans to utilise the funds for the expansion of research and development, product, and go-to-market teams across the three offices in the US, Singapore, and India.

"With a strong momentum of notable alpha customers, the funds will also accelerate its global customer footprint," the firm said.

Founded in 2021, Kula is a recruitment platform that helps companies and recruiters to widen their talent pool by unifying all sources and automating the top candidate outreach and engagement.

The founding team at Kula comprises co-founders Achuthanand Ravi, ex-Stripe, Uber and Freshworks recruiter, Sathappan M, engineer number 3 at Freshworks and later an engineering leader at Grab and Suman Kumar Dey, an early member of the infra team at Freshworks and Grab, and architect at Salesforce.

The seed fundraise comes after six months of the pre-seed announcement where the company raised around $2.7 million, taking the total funding amount to $15 million before the public release of the product.

Kula provides an intuitive Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform for recruiters and founders to automate continual engagement with their top candidates.

It seamlessly integrates with all the tools recruiters interface within a work day including LinkedIn, GitHub Gmail, and the Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

Recruiters can then create automated workflows to engage with their top-of-funnel candidates through emails, LinkedIn nudges and InMails.