Following the acquisition, Hiree will merge with Quikr and the Hiree team, including founders Manjunath Talwar and Abhijit Khasnis, will join Quikr. The combined entity will have more than 4 million active job seekers, Quikr claimed.
Bengaluru: Online classifieds company Quikr India Pvt. Ltd has acquired Bengaluru-based online recruitment platform Hiree (Abhiman Technologies Pvt. Ltd) for an undisclosed amount in an attempt to bolster its job listings business, QuikrJobs, the company said in a statement on Monday.
Following the acquisition, Hiree will merge with Quikr and the Hiree team, including founders Manjunath Talwar and Abhijit Khasnis, will be absorbed into Quikr. The combined entity will have more than 4 million active job seekers, Quikr claimed.
“We have created a successful business model and it’s now time to level up. Speed is in our DNA and Hiree’s offerings, aimed at shortening recruitment cycle times, is a great match with that,” Pranay Chulet, founder and chief executive at Quikr, said in a statement.
Hiree was founded as myNoticePeriod by Talwar and Khasnis in May 2013 and connected potential job seekers serving notice periods with prospective employers in an attempt to fast-track the recruitment process by enlisting active job seekers. In May 2015, the company rebranded itself as Hiree and allowed listings by all categories of job seekers in an attempt to increase its target audience.
The company had raised Rs.20 crore from IDG Ventures and a clutch of angel investors.
However, the company had a bumpy ride as overall hiring, especially by start-ups, slowed down after start-ups scaled back to conserve cash and started focusing on streamlining their operations with the existing workforce following a slowdown in investments. Hiree also pruned its workforce. The firm undertook two rounds of layoffs, in February and in April.
“Joining forces with Quikr allows us to double up our focus on innovating in the recruitment space for both job seekers and our customers. Our customers will now gain from the benefits of Hiree’s technology and massive scale of Quikr in parallel,” Talwar and Khasnis said in a statement. According to its website, Hiree counts firms such as Flipkart, Adobe, Mobikwik, Sasken, Accenture, Microland and Cognizant as clients.
The Hiree acquisition is in line with Quikr’s verticalization drive, under which the company is focusing on five key business segments—automobiles, real estate, jobs, services and customer-to-customer sales—that it has identified as new sources of revenue to fend off competition from other venture capital-backed firms that have emerged in each of these categories.
As a classifieds portal, Quikr has just one rival, OLX, which is backed by Naspers Ltd, a South African mass media company. However, each of the verticals the firm plans to focus on has seen the emergence of a number of well-funded start-ups.
Tiger Global Management-backed Quikr, which has so far raised about $346 million from venture capital firms, has been investing aggressively in building these verticals by both acquiring companies and making strategic investments.
For instance, Quikr acquired real estate portal Commonfloor (maxHeap Technologies Pvt. Ltd) for $120 million in January. This apart, it has acquired Indian Realty Exchange (123 Startup Ventures Pvt. Ltd), a real estate agent aggregator, and RealtyCompass, a real estate analytics start-up, besides making a strategic investment in A.N. Virtual World Tech Ltd, a company which provides 360-degree street views.
In May, Quikr acquired Gurgaon-based home beauty services provider Salosa for an undisclosed amount to bolster its home services business.
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Source: Mint
