Be Nimble accelerator winner and Techstars graduate raises round from investors such as Sixty8 Capital, Elevate Ventures
Qualifi, an on-demand screening platform allowing recruiting teams to phone interview 100s of candidates in minutes, has raised its first round of institutional capital, a $600,000 pre-seed investment. Major investors include: Sixty8 Capital, the Indianapolis-based fund for Black, Brown, women and LGBTQ+-led startups, Elevate Ventures, Queen City Angels, Flywheel Fund and notable angel investors. Qualifi will use the capital to grow its business — from sales and marketing to further optimizing the platform to address customer needs.
The Qualifi platform enables recruiters to create seamless one-way interview experiences using audio and voice that candidates respond to over a standard phone call, eliminating back-and-forth scheduling, reducing communication times with candidates, and capturing better data to help recruiters scale screening efforts. Recruiters using Qualifi shave one week off their time-to-hire average.
"We've been recruiters ourselves and we spend so much time listening to our customers to understand the challenges they face, that we know exactly what they need from us," said Darrian Mikell, CEO and co-founder of Qualifi. "This cash injection will allow us to build functionality into the platform much faster, expanding our capabilities to meet the specific needs of our customers in verticals like healthcare, call centers, and other fast-paced industries."
Founded in 2019, Qualifi grew from the accelerator and Pitch Pardi programs from Be Nimble, a social enterprise supporting the growth of black tech ecosystems. The first graduate of a Be Nimble accelerator to raise a venture capital round, Qualifi's growth proves that eliminating barriers to access and opportunity for founders of color results in high-growth, high-scale tech companies, job creation and ultimately, generational wealth. Qualifi also recently completed its participation in TechStars Anywhere.
"Since Darrian pitched us his idea for Qualifi at Pitch Pardi, I've believed in his mission to make recruiting quicker and simpler," said Kelli Jones, managing partner at Sixty8 Capital and founder/CEO at Be Nimble. "The growth we've seen from Qualifi, its team leadership and impact on its customers reinforced our decision to choose Qualifi as the recipient of our first investment."
"Qualifi has made recruitment more fun," said Calista Rihm, human resources manager at Qualifi customer Reid Health. "The whole process, for both the applicant and the recruiter, is much more streamlined. We have taken hours out of the phone screen process and are able to better serve our applicants, finding the right fit for them in our organization."
To learn more about how to start identifying qualified candidates seven times faster, visit qualifi.hr.
About Qualifi: Qualifi is changing how high-volume and overburdened recruiters screen all their candidates with a software-as-a-service platform that empowers the fastest phone interview experience in the world. The frictionless, on-demand phone screening platform allows teams to scale and returns over a week's worth of time to recruiters while still maintaining a human touch for candidates. Qualifi-initiated interviews are asynchronous and happen within minutes, eliminating the scheduling and coordination effort that slows recruitment processes. Their approach can also reduce bias and helps to capture richer, and more actionable data to make the best hiring decisions. There have been thousands of interviews completed on the Qualifi platform with client profiles ranging from small HR teams of 1 to Fortune 500 companies.
About Be Nimble Foundation
Be Nimble Foundation is a 501(c)(3) social enterprise that uses a qualitative and quantitative approach to creating fully diverse and inclusive tech ecosystems. Our career training and placement programs upskill unemployed, under-employed, and career-transitioners interested in tech industry careers. Our entrepreneurship programs support Black and Latinx tech start-up founders providing them with the resources, support and funding to build high-growth, high-scale tech companies. To learn more about the Be Nimble Foundation, visit benimbleco.com.
