PeopleStrong acquires Grownout, a referral hiring platform
PeopleStrong recently announced the acquisition of Grownout, a B2B SaaS referral platform. With this acquisition, PeopleStrong’s SaaS HR technology PeopleStrong Alt will become the only global recruitment product from India with a comprehensive offering, right from sourcing, matchmaking to offer generation and onboarding – all powered by Machine learning
In an exclusive conversation with People Matters, Pankaj Bansal Co-Founder and CEO, PeopleStrong shares, the idea behind acquiring Grownout were, “We have always believed that Machine learning and AI is going to transform the way HR functions completely. With Grownout, we were able to find synergies both with the product as well as the team which could travel this journey with us. With Grownout the machine learning platform which we recently launched will get strengthened, and our journey towards machine learning in HR will be more exciting.”
Grownout was established 2014 by Sumit Gupta and Harsimran Walia. Grownout started with the vision of making hiring easy, quick and fun by revolutionizing the way referrals are managed. It ensures that a company gets the network of all its employees first hand and does not depend on the employees to reach out to them.
Harsimran Walia, Founders, Grownout shared, “We started Grownout with the vision to revolutionize the world of recruitment. It’s been an exciting journey, and we are looking forward to taking it to the next level as a part of PeopleStrong”.
On being asked about how PeopleStrong is looking forward to integrating grownout, Bansal shared, “Grownout will be part of PeopleStrong Alt product suite and its team will join the core product team of PeopleStrong. He also added users could get modular access to the matchmaking platform.”
Speaking on this development, Vishal Saha, Founding Member, and Chief Technology officer, PeopleStrong said, “We are delighted to have Grownout joining in our product family. Recruitment tech is one of our key focus areas, and Grownout technology will help us take it to the next level through AI based matchmaking & Social Profiling.”
On being asked about the plans after acquiring Grownout, Bansal shares that the organization is looking at some strategic investments in the space of learning and payroll.
This is the fourth strategic investment for PeopleStrong, after Webpay, Summit HR’s Frontline business andIL&S (Wheebox), leading global talent assessment company, where the company owns the major stakes. The company was in the news as it recently closed one of the largest investment transactions in APAC’s HR Tech space.