HackerRank Secures $9.2M In Series B Funding From Khosla Ventures and Battery Ventures To Level The Tech Talent Playing Field for Both Companies and Coders

June 12, 2014 – Today, HackerRank - a platform used by hackers to hone their skills and companies to streamline their recruiting process has raised $9.2 million dollars in Series B funding from Khosla Ventures, Battery Ventures and a host of strong engineering oriented angel investors such as Peeyush Ranjan (VP of Engineering at Motorola Mobility at Google), Greg Badros (former Sr. Director of Engineering at Google and former VP of Engineering & Products at Facebook), and Dan Rubinstein (Director of Product Management at Facebook). 

HackerRank has two sets of users - its popular social platform used by hackers in over 40 countries to hone their skills, and HackerRankX, the enterprise version that is the leading tool for companies to streamline their tech recruiting process.The core value of the platform lies in its ability to objectively evaluate code across different domains of computer science, like Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning and algorithms. HackerRank’s robust core backend thus serves two communities, hackers and companies, with the same set of tools.

“The logical way of attacking the problem of solving technical recruiting is to build something that both hackers and recruiters love.” said Roger Lee, General Partner at Battery Ventures. “That’s exactly the platform that Vivek has built with HackerRank and it’s what compelled me to invest” 

With a fast growing global coder community half a million strong, HackerRank has seen tremendous growth in the last year--doubling revenue each quarter since Q4 of 2013 and bringing out over 50,000 hackers each month to the site. HackerRank’s quick growth comes back to the essential problem it solves --companies who use HackerRankX save on average 80 recruiting hours for every hire made and give them the ability to identify the diamonds in the rough. 

“Software is eating the world and it’s going to be a major part in every industry going forward.” said Vinod Khosla from Khosla Ventures. “There is a massive opportunity here as the free market for tech talent catches up to demand. It will all come down to executing it right, and so far HackerRank is on the right path moving fast. This is one of the many reasons we are leading the B round as well” 

Companies That Span Industries from Banking to Insurance Compete in New Software Race

Companies in every industry--from tech, to energy, to insurance, to banking, to gaming--are using HackerRank to connect to talented engineers across the world. The ways that companies engage candidates through the platform range from direct interviews bolstered by HackerRank’s innovative screening tools, to more creative approaches that use an inbound approach, like hosting developer challenges on HackerRank.com. 

“We’re improving the overall skill level of hackers across the world while helping companies hire the right programmers, in an efficient way that is fair to both sides.” Said Vivek Ravisankar, founder of HackerRank. “As talent increase, products across industries ship faster. Essentially we are speeding up the world. This is like building a time machine.” 

For more details on their enterprise service, interested companies should go to:

 www.hackerrank.com/x

For more details on their free developer platform, interested devlopers should go to: https://www.hackerrank.com/

About HackerRank and HackerRankX

HackerRank is a free platform to solve programming challenges for fun, education, prizes and jobs. HackerRankX, previously known as Interviewstreet, is a technical interviewing platform created by the HackerRank team that streamlines the process from phone interview to on-site interview saving on average, 80 developer hours for every hire made.

About Khosla Ventures

Khosla Ventures offers venture assistance, strategic advice and capital to entrepreneurs. The firm helps entrepreneurs extend the potential of their ideas in breakthrough scientific work in clean technology areas such as bio-refineries for energy and bioplastics, solar, battery and other environmentally friendly technologies as well as traditional venture areas like the Internet, computing, mobile and silicon technology arenas. Vinod Khosla founded the firm in 2004 and was formerly a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins and founder of Sun Microsystems. Khosla Ventures is based in Menlo Park, California. More information is available at www.khoslaventures.com.

About Battery Ventures

Since 1983, Battery has been investing in technology and innovation worldwide. The firm partners with entrepreneurs and management teams across technology sectors, geographies and stages of a company’s life, from seed, start-up and expansion financing, to growth equity and buyouts.

Battery has supported many breakthrough companies around the world, including: Airespace (acquired by Cisco), Akamai Technologies (IPO), Angie’s List (IPO), Anobit (acquired by Apple), Bazaarvoice (IPO), Bladelogic (acquired by BMC), ExactTarget (IPO), Groupon (IPO), Guidewire Software (IPO), ITA Software (acquired by Google), MetroPCS (IPO), Netezza (acquired by IBM) and Skullcandy (IPO). Its current portfolio includes emerging and more established firms such as, Calxeda, Consona, Cumulus Networks, Marketo, Neolane, Opscode, Pursway, VSS Monitoring, XtremIO and Zerto.

From offices in Boston, Silicon Valley and Israel, Battery manages nearly $4B in committed capital, including its current fund of $750M. For more information, visit http://www.battery.com. Follow Battery on Twitter.

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