AllyO, coronavirus, and Fiverr: news of the job board industry

March 3, 2020
JobBoardDoctor
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fiverr Will March come in like a lion and out like a lamb? I have no idea, but I can tell you what happened in February! As is often the case in our industry, there was lots of funding, acquisitions, and a few earnings reports. So without further ado, let’s get to it:

Xiomi invests in WorkIndia: WorkIndia, a blue collar recruitment platform, has raised $6M from Chinese electronics company Xiaomi. Candidates can browse through job opportunities that match their skills and geo-location, and apply through a single click or a call on the WorkIndia App. The app was designed to tap into the prevalence of smart phones and cheap data connectivity in the country over the past few years. Interesting.
Gronda raises funds: Austrian startup Gronda has closed a funding round of €1.5 million to expand internationally. Gronda, founded in 2016, is a European network for food and beverage professionals, and is currently used by more than 250,000 qualified specialists. Gronda’s goal for this year is the registration of one million users on its platform and jobs from more than 12 European countries. A laudable goal.
AllyO sees big growth: AllyO, a provider of conversational AI recruiting automation, announced its 2019 results: a 3.3x increase in Annual Recurring Revenue with more than 97 percent of current customers renewing their contracts and, on average, doubling their spend with AllyO. The company’s overall customer base also nearly doubled. As a result, AllyO’s net dollar renewal rate was over 200 percent. Pretty impressive!
Snagajob launches Shifts in Florida: Snagajob (which is apparently no longer just ‘Snag’) has announced the launch of Shifts in Orlando, Florida. The platform helps in connecting employers with workers looking to staff open shifts in retail, restaurants, hospitality, entertainment, and distribution. In other words, Snagajob does gigs.
CareerBuilder adds SocialReferral: CareerBuilder launched a social recruiting tool that lives within its Talent Acquisition Suite to U.S. customers. The company said SocialReferral will help employees share content and job postings internally and to their own personal networks. Using SocialReferral, employers can create a dedicated space where employees can offer encouragement and recognize success and otherwise participate in the corporate culture. Hmm.
IntelyCare lands funding: IntelyCare, an online staffing platform for nurses, announced a $45 million series B funding round. They had previously announced a $10.8 million series A funding round in November 2018. They also said that their revenue doubled from 2017 to 2019 and that they have filled more than 2 million shift hours since 2017.
Coronavirus and Indeed: Indeed has told more than 1,000 workers in Dublin, Sydney, and Singapore on Monday, February 10th, to work from home about coronavirus. The closures came after Indeed management became aware that an employee in its Singapore office “may have been exposed to coronavirus” after relatives visited a facility caring for patients affected by the outbreak. As an additional precaution, employees in Ireland—its European headquarters—and Australia were told to work from home this week, since some employees who recently visited Singapore also traveled to the Dublin and Sydney offices. Good for them to be proactive!
WorkGenius raises more funds: German company WorkGenius, which is an all-in-one platform for hiring freelancers, has announced another funding round of €6.4 million, taking its total raised to approximately €18.4 million. The company – founded in 2012 – provides a technology platform that allows companies to manage the freelance process from end-to-end rather than utilizing several solution providers.
Google challenges EU: Google is in the EU Court of Justice this week to challenge a €2.4 billion (US$2.62 billion) fine over its handling of online shopping service searches. This case is being closely watched by job boards. It’s the first battle in several antitrust cases that have resulted in a total of nearly US$9 billion in fine. Danish jobs website Jobindex said in a statement that many jobs websites see how this case is handled because they consider it a precursor to possible action over Google for Jobs as the two services are similar. Very interesting.
Jobindex hits $45M: A strong job market led Denmark-based Jobindex Group to achieve net sales of DKK 314 million ($45 million U.S.) in the 2019 financial year. According to a report from the company on Tuesday, Jobindex Group turned a profit (before interest and taxes) of DKK 89 million, which includes the sale of Swedish job board Jobbsafari to Schibsted. Congrats!
Fiverr explodes: Online staffing platform Fiverr reported revenue rose 42.6% in the fourth quarter as the number of active buyers rose along with increased spend per buyer. The company — which started trading publicly in June — is also moving forward with plans to serve larger buyers. CEO and Director Micha Kaufman said the majority of its active buyers are very small companies with 15 employees or less, but Fiverr has plans to expand its addressable market to organizations of up to 200 employees. I’m impressed.
Upwork is up: Online staffing firm Upwork, which ranks as the largest B2B human cloud firm, reported fourth-quarter revenue rose 19.2% year over year. Gross margin improved, but net loss increased to $5.5 million. Upwork’s marketplace revenue rose 21.0% year over year; it primarily includes fees paid by freelancers as a percentage of the total amount freelancers charge. Interesting.