Lachy Groom and Sequoia lead the funding round; Canvas achieves 3x YoY revenue growth as Samsung, Airbnb, Pinterest, Stripe, and many more sign on
Jumpstart, the world’s first Diversity Recruitment Platform (DRP) with a mission to make the world more equitable, announced today that the company is rebranding as Canvas. The company also announced $20 million in new funding, led by Lachy Groom and Sequoia Capital with participation from Four Rivers Capital.
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“We have finally entered an era where companies are being held accountable for their promises of equity and hiring diverse talent,” said Ben Herman, CEO of Canvas. “Canvas is the only platform that helps CEOs and hiring managers to truly walk the walk on diversity, equity and inclusion. Hiring diverse teams is not only a matter of corporate social responsibility, diversity and inclusion are a competitive advantage and strategic priority for every company in today’s landscape. Companies that don’t have diverse talent pipelines will be discredited in the marketplace, overlooked by top talent, and be left behind by their competitors.”
Canvas’ Diversity Recruitment Platform is showing strong signs of momentum, with 3x year over year revenue growth, and is used by prominent customers including Airbnb, Bloomberg, Coinbase, Lyft, Pinterest, Plaid, Roblox, Audible, Stripe, and more. Canvas intends to use the new funding to expand the platform into other industries and verticals beyond technology and address the recruiting process for later stages of people’s careers. The company currently has 70 employees and expects to have 100 by the end of 2021.
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“Canvas is trailblazing a new industry category – Diversity Recruiting Platform (DRP) – that offers a differentiated approach for understanding, benchmarking and evolving diversity in the workplace,” said Mike Vernal, Partner at Sequoia and Canvas board member. “We’re thrilled to double down on our partnership with Ben and the Canvas team as they help more companies source and hire diverse talent.”
The Canvas Diversity Recruiting Platform is a fully virtual recruiting platform that is based on self-reported data. Unlike other solutions that might utilize inferred data that could be inaccurate or illegal, Canvas helps create a more accurate data set to identify diverse candidates, helping to solve the core problem of talent discovery. In fact, 56% of all hires on the Canvas platform are made from Under represented Groups (URGs), and the platform helps employers achieve a 30% reduction in time to hire.
“At Twilio, diversity and inclusion are woven into our core values. We want to go where others don’t, and consider talent others won’t. This means recruiting talent from dynamic backgrounds—including race, education, sexual orientation, income status, and geography—and fostering a culture of belonging. Canvas has enabled this strategy by giving us greater access to diverse pools of talent that want to grow their careers at Twilio,” said Kevin Mottram, Director, Early in Career Talent at Twilio.
With the Canvas Diversity Recruiting Platform, employers can get diversity analytics throughout their pipeline to see possible problem areas and make corrections. Candidates can apply to one company and then get exposure and be considered by other Canvas customers, even if they didn’t apply there; this can help put diverse candidates in front of a bigger pool of potential employers. The Canvas platform includes filters to make it easier and faster to review applications.
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