The process of raising a tech funding round can take months, with executives burning the candle at both ends, perfecting pitches by night and meeting with investors by day. Leadership can finally breathe a sigh of relief and take a moment to catch their collective breath once the final check is cut and the press release announcing the round goes out.
Of course, the work doesn’t stop after the round is cemented and celebrated.
Companies raise rounds to grow, and that growth necessitates hiring. While the hiring goals are often big — both in terms of sheer numbers and the importance of the roles being filled — that doesn’t mean recruiters and leaders are in a rush to get butts into seats.
Funding can actually make companies more judicious about whom they invite for interviews and make offers to. We know because we spoke with employees at two Colorado tech companies that both recently closed rounds about the roles and teams they’re hiring for and what makes candidates stand out. Continue reading to learn more about these companies, their funding, the opportunity in front of them and how you can catch their attention.
To say that business is booming in the cybersecurity industry would be a massive understatement. The U.S. market alone is expected to be worth $64.8 billion in 2022 — an increase of 15 percent from 2021 — according to Statista data.One of the companies riding that growth wave is Swimlane, whose low-code security automation platform is designed to free up teams from responding to endless security incidents.
Swimlane locked down a sizable Series C this summer that pushed its total funding to $154.9 million, according to Crunchbase data. At the time of the round, the company said in a statement that it expected to add 30 employees to its team in the next year. Kelly Dougherty, director of organizational development, told Built In where the company is focusing its hiring efforts and the crucial question candidates have to nail to get past their phone screen.
How much did Swimlane raise in funding, and when was it announced?
On July 6 of this year, Swimlane announced a $70 million growth funding round led by Activate Capital. Existing investors Energy Impact Partners and 3Lines Venture Capital also participated in the round. The new investment will accelerate the company’s ongoing growth and operations on a global scale while continuing to advance its platform innovations in security automation ahead of the competition.
Which teams are your company’s biggest priority for headcount growth right now?
We are hiring very strategically for the remainder of this year: There is not one overall departmental or team focus. We are growing smart — not fast or big — and building teams that can scale with the company. We will be looking for a variety of candidates across many areas that may be cross-functional or perhaps just tactical.
You can have all the experience in the world, but we want to bring in people with passion for what we do.”
What’s the best way for a candidate to progress to a phone screen with you?
We always ask, “Why are you interested in working for Swimlane?” The answer to this is usually pretty critical for myself and the hiring manager. You can have all the experience in the world, but we want to bring in people with passion for what we do, who are excited to help us grow and succeed! If people have a terrible answer, or no answer at all, they’re usually passed over. Do your research and help us understand what makes you the best fit for Swimlane!
Durable is a bit of an enigma, and that’s by design. The company is currently in stealth mode and will only say that its mission is to “transform access to custom software.” According to CEO Nima Keivan, this transformation will come from artificial intelligence, although not AI as it’s currently known.
Instead, Keivan told Built In that his team is on a mission to rethink the current AI paradigm. Durable is hiring for a handful of tech roles to make that happen, and here are the skills and experience you need to join this stealth startup.
How much did Durable raise in funding, and when was it announced?
We haven’t announced our funding or product and are purposefully keeping a low profile. Why? We’re united behind a belief that to build our dream product, the current AI paradigm needs a rethink. Our product requires something different: AI that is rational, explainable, controllable and useful. Building it requires more than feeding data and compute into existing machine learning models.
It requires the development and integration of a complete AI system with both symbolic and neural network-based parts, while staying laser-focused on an MVP that actually solves customer problems. We also happen to believe that this kind of AI is the right one for humanity’s future.
In our experience, tough undertakings like this have a characteristic time constant. They can’t be accelerated with more headcount or funding, and additional headcount may actually slow them down. Our fundraising philosophy is to ensure ample runway for our small team to solve fundamental problems before scaling up.
Which teams are your company’s biggest priority for headcount growth right now?
Building products with tough, early technical challenges is best accomplished by small, cohesive and creative teams with complementary skill sets working collaboratively. Because of that, we’re keeping the team small and only advertising three openings that will play key roles in building our MVP.
The first role is for a machine learning applied scientist with experience working with neurosymbolic systems. This role will complement our existing applied science team by helping define and build the core inference, generalization and learning components.
The second role is for a natural language processing applied scientist with experience building machine learning models that perform translation, semantic parsing or similar functions on our customer interfaces that work with unrestricted natural language inputs.
The last role is a front-end engineer to help build out our customer-facing web application as well as the internal — but no less important — tools we use to inspect and develop the AI components.
We also happen to believe that this kind of AI is the right one for humanity’s future.”
What’s the best way for a candidate to progress to a phone screen with you?
The best way is to reach out to us. Whether you think we’re right or wrong, write to us and tell us. We’re always on the lookout for passionate voices in the ongoing debate. We’re also convinced of the power of diversity, which is one of our company axioms. We mean diversity of experience, skill set and mindset. If you think you could contribute but don’t fit the profile of standard AI research, reach out still. Even though we have few roles open right now, that will change in the future and it’s never too early to get the conversation started. We’d love to hear from you.
