HR tech start-up Skillr raises $1.2 mn from Binny Bansal, Kunal Shah

The funds will be used to build a strong team, boost product development, and co-build powerful hiring solutions with early customers in India and the United States~

HR tech platform Skillr, which helps companies identify and hire skilled talent, has raised $1.2 million in its pre-seed round. The start-up helps companies objectively measure the intangible behavioral skills that are necessary to succeed in customer-facing roles but are hard to identify in interviews.

The company’s pre-seed round of funding was backed by angel investors such as Binny Bansal (Co-founder, Flipkart), Caesar Sengupta (Co-founder, Arbo Works, and former VP, Next Billion Users, Google) and Kunal Shah (Founder, CRED), among others.

Co-founded in 2020 by Ankit Durga and Megha Aggarwal, who are second-time entrepreneurs and leaders in the skilling space, Skillr is a platform that can capture, measure, and predict how people would perform in a workplace. Its machine learning algorithm is being developed alongside researchers at MIT-A Labs and the University of Pennsylvania

Aggarwal said “Rapidly growing startups and enterprises are looking to scale fast, reduce ramp-up time, and design measurably better teams. Skillr’s Talent Discovery Platform is built to address the consistent challenges that employers experience right from discovering, engaging to retaining and growing talent in the long-term — especially today’s young workforce.”

Skillr counts ITC, Mindhouse, Ultrahuman, Blue Tokai, Peebuddy, and Bharatpe amongst others, as its clients. Pankaj Chaddah, co-founder, Mindhouse and  Zomato, said, “I was very impressed with Skillr’s data-driven approach to assessing people’s potential. In just 3 months we’ve seen significantly improved RoI on hiring using Skillr.”