Announcing Ashby’s $30M Series C - Doing More of What We Already Do, Just Faster and Better

As a founder it is most enjoyable to fundraise when you’re trying to accelerate something that is already going really well. We’ve been fortunate to be in that position since our public launch in September 2022. Today I’m excited to announce our $30M Series C.

We had planned this round for later in the year, but were presented with strong offers earlier than expected that provided a healthy up-round from our Series B.

Of course we’re very excited. Of course we’ll continue to invest in Product and Engineering. Of course we’ll also continue to scale our Customer Success teams and Go-To-Market motion. But my goal with this post is to go a bit beyond a regular financing announcement and provide a bit more visibility into where we’re at and what’s next at Ashby. 

Starting with a Thank You

Before we get into details, I want to start with a huge thank you to our customers. It goes without saying that we would not be here without you. Many of you have been early believers in what we’re doing. Virtually all of you have continued to shape Ashby’s product over the recent years by being highly engaged users sharing incredibly valuable feedback.

You’ve also simply been a huge joy to work alongside. For many of you the last few years have not been easy; that makes your partnership with us even more meaningful.

Next, I want to thank the entire Ashby team. You all have delivered exceptional and consistent execution over the last two years. I frequently get notes from customers and other founders about how much we’ve accomplished with a relatively small team. Your work has let us achieve outlier performance in a challenging market.

Picking a Partner for this Round

We were fortunate to receive multiple competitive term sheets. In the end, we decided to go with Lachy Groom, who also led our seed round and has a deep understanding of how we operate, which is nicely summed up in this message I received when he extended his offer:

We’re excited by this vote of confidence. Other existing investors including Elad Gil, F-Prime, and Y Combinator joined this round as well.

Lachy’s note also gives you a sense of what comes next: a continued focus on strong, consistent execution.

Raising money, in and of itself, is by no means a guarantor of future success. We’ll take this moment to reflect on the progress we’ve made in the 19 months since we publicly launched, but then we’re quickly getting back to work.

While we have grown revenue >6x since our Series B and we’re now serving over 1,300 customers (a count that’s quickly growing). We are by no means complacent. 

There remains a lot left to be done and there’s still a huge gap between what we offer today and our ultimate ambition of building truly exceptional software for the talent community.

Our Opportunity & Ambition

We started working on Ashby in late 2018 with the key insight that the work talent teams were doing had changed drastically from the ~2010s (you can read more about our story here).

Recruiting Operations was becoming an increasingly common function. Data was being used to inform more and more decisions. Talent teams were buying a lot of additional tools to plug gaps that had opened up between the prior generation of recruiting software and where TA teams were headed.

At that time, both Abhik and I were very involved in hiring and embedded ourselves with our recruiting teams. We quickly found ourselves thinking: modern TA teams deserve better and more powerful software.

Today, we’ve accomplished a good amount of our “v1 vision.” We have enabled TA teams to use a single, powerful product to run their entire recruiting process across candidate CRM, ATS, and scheduling automation. And we’ve helped TA teams become more data-driven with our uniquely powerful recruiting analytics functionality.

But there’s a lot more to do. Advancements in AI allow a whole set of new functionality that wasn’t thinkable a couple years ago. You’ve seen early versions of this in the Ashby product but there’s a lot more to come. 

Beyond AI, we’re still just scratching the surface of what’s possible when bringing all key TA workflows into a single tool that’s built on a single technology platform. In many areas of the product we’re now spending more energy on “polish and delight.” That means we’ll make many of our most powerful features more accessible and ensure that Ashby continues to do more for you.

The following has been on our careers page since the day we started Ashby and you can think of it as one of our guiding principles:

We are continuously disappointed by the state of software products today —software should be more intelligent, powerful, and do much more for us. Today, most business software is still a simple database with few delightful and truly helpful features.

While we’re excited about our progress to date, this “north star” keeps us focused on all the ways in which we want to improve Ashby in the coming months and years.

Investment in Customer Success

We also understand that your experience with Ashby goes well beyond the product we offer. From day one, we’ve invested deeply in Customer Success and many of you have shared with us how much of an impact that has had on your experience with Ashby.

Excellent customer success is notoriously hard to scale. We’re committed to spending the time, energy, and money to make it happen. We’ve made a number of key hires across our Success teams in the last few months, including our new Head of Support, Allie Hurley. She most recently led Support at ClickUp and will help us expand our support team and further improve our product documentation and self-service capabilities.

Expanding into Enterprise While Keeping Startups Front & Center

Since our Series B, we’ve extended our reach into the Enterprise segment and we’re now working with some of the largest and fastest growing technology companies (many of which we can’t name just yet!). We’ve made deep product investments here, including our unique integration with Workday. We believe that our focus on customizability and automation makes us a unique fit for Enterprise companies that are scaling out of legacy solutions.

While not easy, at the same time we are keeping early stage startups front and center as we continue to improve Ashby. We believe that startups keep us honest in our pursuit of providing best-in-class UX. Startups also serve as a strong foundation for future growth as breakout companies start and scale on Ashby. Rather than the status quo of scaling out of an ATS, our promise to startups is a robust system that scales with them, ensuring they can put talent front and center from day one. 

Join us - We’re Hiring!

Of course we’re continuing to (thoughtfully) grow our own team. No fundraising announcement would be complete without a shout out to our open roles. We also continuously hire for roles that you may not see posted right now. If you want to be considered for these roles as they open, you can join our talent community which we review whenever we open and post new roles.

Thank you again!

If you made it this far: Thanks a lot for your interest in Ashby, whether you’re a customer, prospect, candidate, or partner. If you like to stay in touch with updates we recommend following our LinkedIn page.

Onward, upward and back to work! 📈