Gem raises $100M to transform how companies hire and grow

When Nick and I founded Gem, we did so on the thesis that companies can’t hire the best people for their needs while sitting around and waiting for them to apply. Just like you market products to people who haven’t considered them yet, you need to do the same to land “passive talent.”Research shows that only 30% of people are actively looking for a new job, while only 42% of applicants meet the minimum qualifications of the role they’re applying to. When you layer in today’s hyper-competitive hiring market and the long-overdue focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, there’s simply no way to accomplish hiring goals with the old way of doing things.That’s where Gem helps by enabling companies to attract and hire the talent they need up to five-times faster – at scale and in a predictable way. Users can simplify sourcing work on social sites like LinkedIn or Twitter, build talent pools that sync to their applicant tracking system (ATS), nurture passive candidates with personalized messages, and leverage analytics to optimize all aspects of recruiting operations. Altogether, Gem becomes the source of truth for all talent relationships, working seamlessly with the rest of the recruiting tech stack – just like Salesforce does for customer and prospect relationships.We’re currently helping over 800 incredible customers across all industries, including Peloton, Shopify, Cisco Meraki, Hinge Health, MongoDB, and Twilio.

It’s time to accelerate

I’ve been blown away by the market’s reception to Gem in only four short years. It’s clear the problem we’re solving is pervasive and quickly growing in importance for almost every company in the world. As a result, we’ve raised $100M in Series C funding at a $1.2B valuation to enable us to move even faster. The round was led by ICONIQ Growth and includes participation from returning investors Greylock and Accel, as well as newcomers Sapphire Ventures and Meritech Capital.“We have had our eye on Gem for a long time because the product has helped so many of our business partners hire the people that fuel their growth,” says ICONIQ Growth General Partner Matt Jacobson. “We have heard time and time again that Gem is irreplaceable because of the way it combines talent sourcing, nurture, CRM, and analytics into a complete and modern recruiting suite. For recruiters, we believe it provides massive productivity gains, and for all business leaders, it offers a real-time view of the candidate funnel and how their teams are tracking toward hiring goals.”

Powering the growth of 100 unicorns

We love nothing more than to see our customers have success. As of September 2021, Gem counts over 100 "unicorns'' as customers, defined as private businesses valued at $1B or higher. These include companies like Gusto, Sift, and Cockroach Labs.For many, unicorn status is a step on the path to even greater heights. In the last year, half of the ten-biggest IPOs in the U.S. are by Gem customers, including Robinhood and Affirm.

Record business growth for Gem

It’s been a breakout year where we tripled annual recurring revenue (ARR), doubled our customer-base, and boosted average enterprise deal sizes by 70%.Thanks to the strength of the product, the number of monthly active users has more than quadrupled compared to a year ago. Customers also showed their support through a 4.9 / 5.0 rating on G2 Crowd, putting us at the top of our industry.

Funding that will fuel expansion into new markets

Gem already has a strong foothold in the Enterprise market, and has seen net retention in this segment that exceeds 120%. As a result, we'll be ramping up our go-to-market efforts to increase awareness with more of the Fortune 500.In addition to expanding upmarket, we will continue investing internationally. Gem already serves customers throughout the world, but will invest more in local points of contact in high-growth regions like Western Europe.

Deeper investments in product innovation

This new round of capital enables us to double down on a few key areas that will extend the value Gem can deliver:

• Talent Reporting & Insights – Everyone from talent leaders to recruiting operations teams has a need to see progress toward hiring goals, understand drop-off, improve diversity, and forecast capacity needs for the future. Last year, we released Pipeline Analytics and were blown away by the response. We’ll be investing even more here going forward, starting with customizable dashboards that provide anyone with a one-stop-shop for the hiring metrics they care about.

• Talent Engagement – Our customers have told us that building great relationships with passive candidates is essential to differentiating themselves in the hiring process. But it needs to be possible at scale. Much like automation transformed sales and marketing years ago, Gem has been doing the same thing for recruiting. Recently, we added SMS (text) communication to our candidate relationship management suite, and will continue to invest in a variety of new channels and techniques that make outreach more customized.

• Talent Marketing – Gem started with a sourcing product, but there are many additional ways to fill a pipeline with qualified candidates. These include events, campus recruiting, ads, and much more. Last year, we launched new features in this area like career site forms, and soon, you'll see a bunch of new ways to enable talent marketing in Gem – starting with branded email templates.

• Simpler Workflows & Collaboration – Finding great people requires sourcers, recruiters, ops teams, and hiring managers all working together in an efficient way. Gem enables handy workflows that span systems and save tons of time on repetitive tasks. For example, you can automatically refresh candidate profiles with their latest job status to ensure your outreach is relevant and timely. And soon, hiring teams will be able to build talent pools for new roles by searching profiles across Gem and their ATS. Our goal is to replicate the efficiency gains we brought to sourcing workflows across all the ways candidates enter the hiring funnel.

• Deeper integration support – Gem already is a leader in connecting talent to companies by integrating with all the major social networks and applicant tracking systems. With this funding, we'll be doubling down on our integrations and unlocking even more simplicity for customers

We have so much in store across the entire product, so please stay tuned!

We're excited for you to join us on this journey

To our customers – we wouldn't be here without you. Please keep the feedback coming so we can continue helping you bring in the talent that drives your business forward.To our employees – you’re all Gems to Nick and me. We've had so much fun building this company the past four years, and it's so important to us that Gem remains a world-class place to work as we scale.To those who want to learn more about Gem – whether you envision yourself as a future customer, employee, or both at some point, we'd love to hear from you!
– Steve