Crew raises $2.3M to launch the first all-in-one recruiting CRM

We are thrilled to announce that we are publicly launching Crew today, and we raised a seed round of $2.3M ! 🎉

• After more than a year in closed beta, Crew will be available to everyone starting from today
• The seed round is co-lead by Rebel, Secret & Kima,  with participation of angel investors including Indeed’s co-founder, Workday's GM, Join’s CEO, Pitch’s CEO, Airbnb’s ex Director of Product, Spendesk’s VP Sales, Twitter’s ex VP of Engineering…
• 100 companies are using Crew, and 1000 monthly active users in January 2023. Would you be the next one? 😊

A major shift: from inbound to outbound recruiting

In 2004, Indeed launched the first job search engine, soon after online job boards emerged as the most efficient way for companies to reach a larger pool of potential candidates. In recent years, a new paradigm for recruiting emerged, marked by the growing competition for talent. Companies are now recognizing the need to look beyond job boards when sourcing candidates and are increasingly seeking candidates out in an outbound fashion. This is especially true in the tech sector where the majority of jobs that exist today didn’t exist ten years ago, and where the pool of talent is as a result much smaller.

“The war for talent means that companies are no longer willing to simply wait for candidates to come to them. The vast majority of talent, especially great ones, are not actively looking for work, and by targeting only the active job seekers, companies are closing themselves off to a huge pool of skilled candidates. Companies must therefore multiply their efforts to source passive candidates, which requires them to resort to new strategies to target a large number of qualified people” says Amine, CEO and co-founder of Crew

Introducing the new generation of recruiting tool

Crew is the first ATS built like a CRM to address the growing needs of the recruiting industry. It gives recruiters and teams the ability to seek out talent, as a team, while being efficient at scale:

• Outbound CRM: Crew is a CRM which combines 1/ an outreach automation tool, 2/ strong nurturing capabilities, and 3/ an actionable database. Crew equips companies with the required features to shift from inbound to outbound hiring.
• Built for teams: Hiring is now a team effort and is no longer the sole responsibility of the recruiter. Companies require a collaborative and user-friendly tool to ensure its adoption by all stakeholders, including hiring managers, team members, advisors, and investors.
• With productivity in mind: With features like strong automations, smart reminders, and workflows designed for speed, Crew helps recruiting teams be more productive and source a large number of qualified candidates in a short period of time.

“The adoption of CRM (Candidate Relationship Management) technology specifically for recruitment is a growing necessity for companies. For years, they have been building relationships with potential candidates through sourcing, but without a dedicated tool to assist them, similar to a sales and marketing team lacking tools like Salesforce or Hubspot to manage their customer relationships.”

Ruben Gueunoun, Chief Revenue Officer and co-founder of Crew

$2.3M raised with top angel operators across industries

Launched out eFounders in September 2020, Crew later joined Y Combinator’s accelerator program to launch its first version of the product. Crew is now used by 100 active companies, representing 1000 monthly active users. These companies have added more than 100,000 talents and hired 800 talents on Crew in 2022.

After 18 months of restricted beta access, Crew announces today the launch of its product in self-serve and a seed fundraising round. Crew, has secured $2.3 million in funding through a strategic approach. The funding round was led by prominent US and French seed-stage funds such as Rebel, Secret, and Kima, who believe in the startup's growth potential in Europe and the US.

In addition to these funds, the Crew team has also attracted experienced operator angel investors who bring a wealth of expertise to the table. This includes recruiting experts (Paul Forster co-founder of Indeed), as well as experts in sales (Nicolas Marchais, VP Sales at Spendesk), product (Sam Edelson, ex Director of Product at Airbnb and Christian Reber co-founder of Pitch, Superlist), research & design (Behzod Sirjani of Slack & Reforge), and tech (Nick Caldwell ex VP Engineering at Twitter & Hubspot and Olivier Bonnet, CTO at BlaBlaCar).

“At Rebel, we like the recruiting CRM market due to both its size ($50B+) and ACV ($12k+ per SMB client). Crew has the right team to build a better, more modern ATS since Amine has founded 2 companies in the recruiting field in the past, with a strong product experience, and Ruben was Head of Ops at a leading European Fintech. Their timing is good because while incumbents in this space are building ever more complex tools, mostly for enterprise, nobody is tackling the simpler end of the market as well as Crew.” Jared Heyman, Managing Partner at Rebel Fund.

Starting today, Crew is available in self-serve with a transparent pricing. While Traditional ATS require a lengthy sales and onboarding process, which takes time to set up and train new users. Crew is the first recruiting tool to offer self-service, with an intuitive interface that allows for easy setup and eliminates the need for training.  Despite offering a high-end product, Crew’s low pricing is made possible by our streamlined sales process and reduced onboarding requirements.