Spintop Ventures invests in HR tech company Adway to accelerate international growth. Adway reshapes the recruitment industry by innovative solutions to find highly sought-after passive candidates on social media, thus increasing talent pools and diversity.
Gothenburg, 16th June: Adway is announcing that it has raised €3.2M to accelerate their product innovation and international expansion, led by Spintop Ventures and Brightly Ventures. The fast-growing HR Tech company is reshaping the entire recruitment industry, using AI to remove the human biases. They’re also doing this on the new battleground for top talent: Social Media platforms.
Since the start of 2018, Adway has had strong growth and helped many employers in Sweden to attract top talent to their companies. The company’s AI-powered software and Social Talent Pools product identifies highly sought-after passive candidates on social media and entices them to apply for jobs they would not otherwise discover or consider. The AI-powered software has also helped many companies increase the diversity of their employees by impartially choosing who is exposed to jobs and encouraged to apply.
The HR tech landscape has become one of the most highly contested and lucrative spaces, with many VC’s backing companies in the fight to win the learning, development, compensation and workforce battles. “All eyes are now on the lucrative talent acquisition sector which is the final one to experience a major tech and AI transformation. The team at Adway have had a meteoric rise in a short 3 years and now have the opportunity to take the recruitment marketing world by storm” says Kerstin Cooley, Managing Partner at Brightly Ventures.
Peter Carlsson agrees and has seen similar transformations of this seismic scale before. “If you look at the e-commerce industry and pinpoint the moments which transformed the world and set aside the winners from the rest, it was definitely the utilisation of mass data to deliver unprecedented personalisation and predictive decisioning. This is exactly what Adway is pioneering for recruitment and the timing couldn’t be better” said Peter Carlsson. “We are happy to add another Gothenburg based company to the Spintop portfolio, another confirmation of the exciting tech start-up scene in the region“
During the pandemic, the founders Viktor Nord and Richard Sörensson’s faith in the company was strengthened even more and made them put in an extra gear by bringing in the experienced scale-up entrepreneur, Adrian McDonald, as CEO.
“If we’ve reaffirmed anything from the pandemic, it’s that the battle for top talent is now operating on a global level. This is makes it more expensive and complex for companies to compete for the best people. Our goal is to make recruiting easier, cost efficient and less biased with AI and automation” says Adrian McDonald.
With an innovative suite of products and €3.2M in funding, Adway’s ambitions are to now replicate their early success in the larger UK market, targeting large enterprises which are feeling the pain of the pandemic and the competitiveness of a global talent pool.
“We won’t forget that we operate in a business where people still need to connect with one another. The HR function has become smarter, more tech savvy and data-driven. This means that our customers expect significantly better results, insights and, most of all, more time back to invest in people. This is why AI becomes so crucial to their success in TA and we want to be the major global partner” Adrian McDonald continues.
About Spintop Ventures
Spintop Ventures is a Swedish early-stage Venture Capital company investing in Nordic software enabled technology companies. Spintop, started in 2009, is backed by the European Investment Fund, Saminvest, Sitra and many high-profile tech entrepreneurs and is currently investing from Spintop’s third fund. Spintop has a sustainable ESG investment agenda for its funds and portfolio companies. Further information at https://spintopventures.com/
