At GGV, we’re delighted today to announce that we’ve formally partnered with Crosschq, the leader in human intelligence hiring, leading the company’s $4.1M seed financing. We’re excited that Bessemer Venture Partners has joined us in this round. GGV’s investment in Crosschq stems from our longtime focus on the importance of building top notch teams and using technology to ensure the best people get hired for jobs that most match their respective skill sets. Crosschq is bringing essential product and technologies to this arena. Our excitement for the Crosschq opportunity is derived from the company’s strong founding team, the company’s focus on the overwhelmingly large hiring market, and the strong momentum Crosschq has built in a short period of time.
Founding Team. Mike Fitzsimmons and Pete Goettner are the type of driven and talented founders we love to back at GGV. Mike brings extensive leadership experience to the CEO role of Crosschq. Notably, Mike ran Delivery Agent, a high growth Silicon Valley based startup for over a decade as CEO. Pete similarly brings a variety of valuable experiences to the Chief Product Officer role at Crosschq. Pete founded and ran Digital Think earlier in his career, taking the company all the way from inception to IPO and beyond. Mike and Pete are determined to make Crosschq a huge success, and have begun assembling a strong team around them to help execute on their plan. This funding will help enable further team growth.
Exciting Marketing Opportunity. Crosschq’s mission is to help businesses hire the right person for every open position, assessing role and cultural fit. The company is pioneering a new software category called Human Intelligence Hiring™ that marries human insights with predictive analytics and machine learning to make sure the company and the employee are the best fit for each other. Crosschq is bringing an enterprise SaaS platform to market to reduce people risk by providing fast, transparent and bias-free data about prospective job candidates. Bad hires cost money, time and can have massive consequences. Half of new hires don’t last 18 months, and nearly 20% don’t make it past the sixth month mark. Crosschq is reinventing reference checking to eliminate this issue and help companies make better hires. The company’s platform goes beyond traditional background screening by using machine learning and AI to analyze data from proprietary human sources to provide predictive analytics about people, their behavior, and the benefits and/or risks they may pose to customers, other employees, and/or an organization. This approach makes good sense for companies across all size of company, all industries and all geographies – the market is large and compelling.
Strong Momentum. Crosschq first launched its solution in January of 2019. Despite the short time in the market, the company has amassed a strong, loyal and growing customer base including the likes of Eventbrite, Nerd Wallet, DialPad and Billtrust. Additionally, the company’s pipeline is expanding rapidly with large, growing companies. The word is out that Crosschq’s human intelligence hiring approach makes its software platform extremely valuable. All of our conversations with existing customers indicated extremely high customer satisfaction and utility of the platform. At GGV, we’ve seen many successful Saas application platforms, such as Successfactors and Zendesk, grow into big companies, and we know that the early days are important and indicative of future success. Crosschq is on its way.
GGV has had our biggest successes backing top-notch entrepreneurs, going after large and growing markets with unique approaches and strong momentum. We couldn’t be more excited for our Crosschq investment in this context!