Recruitment platform Ashby has raised $21.5 million in funding. The Series B round was led by F-Prime Capital with participation from Elad Gil, Lachy Groom, Semper Virens, Base Case Capital and Gaingels, bringing Ashby’s total raised to $34.5 million.

The five-year-old company was launched out of stealth in 2018 and funding would be injected through equity financing.

“Recruitment teams are being disproportionately impacted by current tech layoffs — this creates the need to run leaner budgets and do more with less headcount. Ashby is consolidating recruitment tools for companies with double-digit employee counts. [The platform’s] automation of tasks like sourcing and scheduling are big advantages for lean recruiting teams," The company's founder Benjamin Encz told Tech Crunch.

The co-founders, Benjamin Encz and Abhik Pramanik met while working together at PlanGrid, a construction productivity software startup and germinated the idea to start a recruitment platform.

According to the co-founders, Ashby will replace vendors like Greenhouse and Lever - who provide solutions with algorithms — specifically scheduling and profiling algorithms. Ashby uses AI to automatically find times that work for interviewers and interviewees and infer demographic data like gender and ethnicity, which clients use for aggregate analyses of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hiring metrics.

The enduring demand for HR tech has worked favourably in Ashby's favour. The market has proven remarkably resilient in the face of both pandemic and economic headwinds, as companies invest in digital infrastructure and macroeconomic fears increase the pressure on HR teams — some of which had to contend with layoffs among their ranks — to vet candidates carefully.