AdeptID Announces $3.5 Million in Seed Funding to Support Hidden Talent in the Workforce With Machine Learning

• Company’s talent matching software identifies transferable skills for the 80M Americans without college degrees in order to improve job mobility and address the labor shortage

AdeptID, the developer of a machine-learning-powered talent matching software that identifies hidden talent in the workforce, announced a raise of $3.5M in seed funding led by Zeal Capital Partners. Better Ventures, JFF’s Employment Technology Fund, and other investors participated in the round. The investment comes at a pivotal time for the future of work, as the pandemic amplifies labor shortages in high-growth sectors and increases the need for upward job mobility to fill middle-skilled roles.

AdeptID closes the labor gap by identifying hidden talent among the 80 million working Americans without college degrees and connecting them with relevant in-demand jobs or training based on transferable skills that have been observed in hundreds of thousands of job transitions. Since launching the public API earlier this year, the company has already licensed its AI models to YearUp, Generation USA and Enel Green Power to programmatically improve their talent strategies and facilitate an inclusive approach to discovering and developing talent.

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“Poor talent matching is a problem experienced by stakeholders across the workforce ecosystem, resulting in over $1.3T of wasted tuition and lost annual profits in the U.S. alone,” said AdeptID co-founder and CEO Fernando Rodriguez-Villa. “While skills-based matching and technology isn’t a new idea, it has historically been hard to use, siloed, and way too expensive. We see a massive opportunity to improve outcomes for both those in the workforce looking to improve their economic mobility as well as employers struggling to fill roles in growth areas like allied health, IT, and renewable energy.”

“We are excited to join AdeptID because of their differentiated technical expertise and early partnerships, but also because of their collaborative business model,” said Nasir Qadree, Managing Partner at Zeal Capital, who will be joining the company’s board. “Their API-first approach makes their matching capabilities available to any future-of-work offering, and reflects the inclusiveness of both of our missions. There is a growing emergence of transformative talent companies being built today and it’s exciting to forecast how AdeptID will assist the advancement of their work.”

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The company will use the seed investment to accelerate software development and scale distribution through its API partners. By taking a matching-capabilities-as-a-service approach to solving the labor gap, AdeptID is providing open and industry-wide access to its recommendation engine as it scales to become critical infrastructure for improving economic mobility. Furthermore, as both employers and job seekers become increasingly wary of algorithmic job filters eliminating a large percentage of the population for in-demand jobs, AdeptID is taking an affirmative approach by utilizing its algorithms to recommend rather than reject candidates.

“We don’t think job matching should be done in a localized fashion, nor should it require a new full-stack tech solution, hiring a team of PhDs or one-off consulting engagements,” added Rodriguez-Villa. “In the same way anyone building an eCommerce application can confidently turn to Stripe to handle payments, builders in the talent ecosystem can now turn to AdeptID to identify and support talent in an inclusive fashion with only a few lines of code. Zeal Capital and the other investors fundamentally believe in this approach, and we’re thrilled to have them as partners.”

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