We’ve been on an incredible journey since 2020, and we’re proud to reach a new milestone with a special funding announcement.

We’re delighted to reveal that Intrro has closed a $2.2m early-stage financing round led by Berlin-based signals Venture Capital, with participation from Silicon Valley-based Tribe Capital and T-Bird Capital, as well as Dataframe Ventures from New York.

The investment represents a vote of confidence in Intrro, but more importantly, it will help us on our mission to transform recruitment for good. It means we can fuel our growth by investing in our product, data science and engineering teams. And it means we can help more companies hire the best quality candidates from their co-workers’ recommendations, and at a scale that matches the demand for tech talent. We’re really excited that we can bring Intrro to more customers across the globe.

Of course, growth and capital is all well and good, but why does the world need Intrro? Right now, we’re living at a time where technology is often billed as the silver bullet to solve every problem. But while automation can mean efficiency, it can also mean spammy emails that no one wants to receive. And while AI theoretically means better decision making, all too often it leads to the same biases that characterise the way humans hire. 

In general, recruitment and HR are the final frontier in terms of industries that are yet to digitise. Recruitment tech often feels like sales and marketing tech, where candidates are treated like ‘prospects’ that need to be ‘nurtured’. I’m not convinced this is the right approach – it’s five years behind. Intrro is on a mission to make the hiring process more human.

Intrro was born in 2020, but our story begins way before that. I met Neel Shah (Intrro co-founder) at Adecco, where we directly experienced some of the recruitment industry’s problems first-hand. We discovered that only 7% of applications come from referrals, but more than 30% of hires do. This discrepancy doesn’t help anyone, so we decided to do something about it.

We never did things the easy way. We quit our jobs and bootstrapped the first version of the product with our life savings. We interviewed more than 200 software engineers from Fabrika, a hostel in Tbilisi that used to be a clothes factory during the Soviet days. We then set-up camp in Georgia – a tiny country of 3.9 million people, where referrals are very much part of the DNA. We were lucky enough to meet our founding engineer & CTO Vasil Rekhviashvili, and the rest is history!

Since then, we’re proud that Intrro has grown 20x in revenue, and we’re honoured to be helping to scale employee referrals at some of the world’s fastest growing companies. 

Intrro works on the basis that it’s the whole team that helps make the hire – not just the recruiters. Recruiters love Intrro for the speed and ease of use, while talent operations love it because it enables collaboration between hiring teams and their co-workers. The result is greater oversight on the highest quality talent in a company’s network, which means less costly mistakes, faster hiring processes, and a consistent pipeline of quality candidates. 

What gets me most excited is that Intrro is contagious. Once a recruiter uses Intrro, two things tend to happen: it becomes a daily habit, and they share it with their teammates. When Intrro is used habitually by internal talent teams, and in full alignment with talent management goals, we see organisations go from strength to strength.

As we look to the future, we want to empower more companies to get high quality and diverse referrals through their employees’ networks. While the hiring market has perhaps never been as challenging as it is now, we believe the solution lies in giving businesses the tools to hire more effectively through referrals. At a time when mission, values and culture are becoming crucial in a candidate’s decision making process, Intrro can help hiring teams identify, verify and attract the most suitable talent by leveraging their employees’ networks. We’re rapidly adding customers from some of the world’s fastest growing companies. And the good news? We’re just getting started.