Polish hiring platform DevSkiller raises €1 million to develop end-to-end talent management system

DevSkiller, a Warsaw-based platform that tests the coding skills of job applicants, has raised €1 million in bridge funding from SpeedUp Energy Innovation (SEI). The investment will help the startup expand its product into a comprehensive skills development and talent management tool. “We’ve started off with DevSkiller which is the technical skills assessment platform powered by RealLifeTesting,” says Jakub Kubrynski, DevSkiller CEO. RealLifeTesting is a proprietary method that ensures the programming tests accurately reflect the challenges of an actual job. Kubrynski continued, “The next natural step for us was to start expanding our software range to become the first one-stop-shop for hiring and developing talent using our end-to-end system for sourcing, screening, interviewing, hiring, and talent analytics.”  Such a talent management platform is already being tested by some customers. Founded in 2013, the Polish startup’s only other funding was a $500,000 seed round in 2017. Today the SaaS platform is used by over 250 customers from nearly 60 countries, including the US, the UK, Canada, France, Australia, Sweden, Japan, and China. The customers are no small fish, either: PayPal, Cisco, ING, Deloitte, Criteo, and EY, among others. “Considering their achievements, DevSkiller required very little funding so far and I have to say, this has been by far the easiest investment decision for us in a very long time,” said Bartlomiej Gola, founding partner at SpeedUp Group and managing partner at SEI. SEI is a fund established under the BRIdge VC program, a combination of public and private support from PGE Ventures, the Polish Development Fund and SpeedUp Group. The fund’s budget is around €25 million. Last year the startup participated in the New York-based Ellis Accelerator program, which is designed to help international startups to expand to the US market and raise funding. This year global expansion remains a priority, with specific focus on Scandinavia.

Photo: Co-founders of DevSkiller; Marek Kaluzny, Mariusz Smykula, Kate Kandefer, Jakub Kubrynski, Tom Winter