Ukrainian HR startup Hirio raises $400,000
Hirio, a Ukrainian HR tech startup, has raised $400,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by the founders of a unicorn company Pipedrive, Ragnar Sass, Martin Henk, and Martin Tajur.
According to Hirio, the investment will be used to accelerate the startup’s growth in international markets.
The round was led by the founders of Pipedrive, Ragnar Sass, Martin Henk, and Martin Tajur with the participation of former Pipedrive employees, Kair Kasper, Martin Koiva (also are founders of Klaus), Elar Nellis (co-founder of Salto & LIFT99), and other business angels.
“Our initial goal was to raise $300,000 to meet our KPIs and growth goals. Once we made an offer to the market to invest in Hirio, we generated extremely high interest from investors and decided to increase our target amount to $400,000. Two more days later, we again had more offers than we needed, even for the $400,000 goal. Thanks to this, we were able to select investors with the most relevant expertise for Hirio and close the round in five days,” says startup CEO Kostantin Miska.
The founders decided to use the investment for more active growth in international markets. According to co-founder and CTO Artem Dudinskyi, Hirio is primarily targeting the U.S. market, which has more than 70 million low-skilled workers, and where companies still use Excel to streamline the hiring process.
LIFT99 Kyiv Hub acted as a fundraising facilitator in this round. Hirio joined it back in June 2020.
“It is extremely sad to see how early-stage Ukrainian startups are being undervalued and removed from the investment radars of international angel investors, whereas international expertise is exactly what is needed to have these products take off and conquer the rest of the world. We decided to change it by inviting international angel investors and VC funds from our network to come to talk with our Hub members, make matches with Ukrainian founders, and had success cases,” commented Tanya Chaykovskaya, CEO of LIFT99 Kyiv Hub.
About Hario
Hirio was founded by Kostantin Miska and Artem Dudinskyi in February 2020. Hirio automates core parts of recruitment, including screening, coordinating, and assessment of ideal candidates, with the help of advanced AI technologies.
The current user list includes such major players in the Ukrainian market as Rozetka, Raketa, Metro, and others.