Software maker Phenom People raises $30 million, to hire 75 to boost global sales

Phenom People, the Ambler-based software maker that eases the hiring process at companies from Microsoft to Merck, says it has raised another $30 million in its third venture-capital round.

The money will help Phenom People expand and market its hiring software platform used by Southwest Airlines, Hershey, NFI Industries, and 300 other large companies, their recruiters, said chief executive and cofounder Mahe Bayireddi in an interview.

The company combines career website “chatbot,” customer-management software, and recruiting apps into a “talent management experience” platform — TXM, in human resources jargon — which reviews candidates data and speeds up recruit verification, updating candidate-job matches as the system collects new information.

The software is designed not just for job applications, but to search candidate and employer data from other sources. It then matches it to current and new jobs at client companies and shoots it to managers and recruiters for fast action, while also showing candidates what else they may need to qualify, Bayireddi said.

“We don’t really replace Oracle or SAP” or other business software systems with personnel applications. “We are partners with them,” the CEO added. “We are a layer that sits on top” and manages the “whole hiring experience. If they are Comcast, we are Netflix. If Salesforce is the back end, we are at the front end.”

Phenom People employs about 500, up from 300 at its last capital-raising in 2018. About 200 worked in Ambler, the rest at its software centers in Hyderabad, India, and Tel Aviv, Israel, and a new office in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The company says it expects to add 75 jobs in the Philadelphia area this year and is scouting sites for a Philadelphia office.

Investors leading the new round are WestBridge Capital, based in the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius, which has become a base for tech investors focused on Indian and U.S. companies that use Indian tech labor; and AllianceBernstein, a New York arm of France-based insurance and investment giant AXA.

Phenom People had previously raised another $31 million in two rounds from investors including AXA Venture Partners, another AXA unit; Sierra Ventures, a Silicon Valley firm whose founder, Peter Wendell, is a WestBridge adviser; Omidyar Technology Ventures, started by eBay (corrected) cofounder Pierre Omidyar; Sigma Prime Ventures, of Boston; and Karlani Capital, headed by Rudy Karsan, founder of Wayne-based recruitment software developer Kenexa, now part of IBM. Each of those earlier investors also joined the new round.

“We look for global investors that help our cause,” Bayireddi said. “AXA gives us access in Europe. WestBridge gives access to Asia.” He said U.S. and European companies with as few as 5,000 employees find they need to recruit in dozens of countries. They need software that works across borders, as Phenom People is designed to.

Phenom People’s approach to career data and hiring “is unrivaled in today’s marketplace,” WestBridge Capital founder Sumir Chadha said in a statement. “This matches the market direction toward experience management for talent.”

The company’s “experience management” is “the next era” for companies hiring across borders, said Abhishek Sud, managing director at AllianceBernstein. “Phenom People is pioneering the standards and technology,” he added. “They have an impressive portfolio” of big customers.

Phenom People was founded in 2011 by Bayireddi and his brother Hari Bayireddi, Indian-trained computer scientists (Bayireddi also holds a Temple MBA), and “chief people officer” Brad Goldoor, a former executive at newspaper publisher Gannett Corp. and help wanted ad sales site CareerBuilder.com.