Fountain Raises $85 Million in Funding to Help Companies Hire Hourly Workers

• Softbank Vision Fund 2 Leads Investment to Accelerate Company’s Growth and Innovation in Recruiting Tech

Fountain, the world’s leading all-in-one applicant tracking system for high volume hiring, announced $85 million in Series C financing, led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2* with participation from B Capital Group and Mirae Asset Venture Investment, and existing investors DCM, Origin Ventures, Commerce Ventures, SemperVirens Venture Capital and Uncork Capital. This new round follows strong company momentum in 2021 as revenue grew 220% year-over-year. Fountain now has more than 250 customers including Chipotle Mexican Grill, John Lewis & Partners and Just Eat Takeaway. With the Series C, Fountain has now raised $119 million to date. Fountain will use the new funding to continue to invest in innovation of its hiring platform, as well as to grow its sales and engineering teams and its operations and presence in EMEA and APAC regions.

“With labor acquisition being one of the top challenges companies face today, Fountain provides an all-in-one hiring platform to help enterprises streamline their hiring for high volume, hourly workers,” said Andrew Zloto, Director at SoftBank Investment Advisers. “We are delighted to partner with Sean and the Fountain team to support their mission of helping companies find and hire the right people quickly to meet today’s labor needs.”

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High volume hiring — defined as needing to fill over 1,000 positions in a short period of time or receiving more than 1,000 applications per position — is proving to be a daunting task for recruiters to meet. More than 6 in 10 companies have high volume recruitment needs according to research done by Aptitude, a leading human capital management research and advisory firm and Fountain. And almost 7 in 10 companies stated that they are getting fewer candidates applying for jobs this year than last year for positions including gig workers and hourly roles, customer service and call center representatives, healthcare staff, seasonal financial services, data entry specialists and statisticians. The rebound from COVID has exacerbated hiring challenges, as the demand for hourly workers has greatly exceeded supply. Employers spend millions on sourcing candidates, but screen them with phone calls and emails, leading to poor, impersonal candidate experiences.

Fountain’s mission is to open opportunities for the global hourly workforce by helping employers like Chipotle Mexican Grill and Liveops who have high volume hiring needs, find and hire the right people in a smart, fast and seamless manner. Fountain has helped companies process over 16 million applicants in the past 12 months alone, and helped hire more than 2 million so far in 2021. It takes the average Fountain user 8.70 median days to hire, as opposed to the industry average of 36 days.

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“Many companies are struggling to hire hourly workers, which number around 82 million and represent more than half of all wage and salary workers in the US alone,” said Sean Behr, CEO of Fountain. “Fountain’s solutions have enabled businesses to make more than two million hires so far in 2021 by simplifying, optimizing and automating as much of the candidate journey as possible to decrease time-to-hire.”

“The hiring of both hourly and gig workers have become mission-critical to companies worldwide. Fountain solves this problem by automating every stage of the hiring process, from recruiting to onboarding, which significantly reduces time-to-hire. B Capital Group is excited to work with Sean and the team at Fountain to support customers in this fight for talent, not just in the US, but globally,” said Sami Ahmad, General Partner at B Capital Group.

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