Polish fund EEC Magenta finalised another investment. PLN 3.2 million for further development was transferred to the Wrocław-based start-up company ChallengeRocket.com – a platform that connects specialists from the IT industry, among others, with corporate employers. This is the Fund’s third investment over the last five months.
The demand for programmers is growing globally and the biggest economies are already fighting for IT specialists. The increasing deficit of qualified staff is the result of the emergence of completely new infrastructures already present in the field of the industrial Internet of Things, or distributed energy integration. Managing the data embedded in such infrastructures poses yet another challenge. As a result, the need for digitisation becomes a pressing issue also for those enterprises that were not previously identified with running extensive IT operations. Acquiring talent from this industry is both a difficult and expensive process and is very likely to become a barrier to a company’s development. To attract the attention of the candidates, organisations strongly focus on building the image of the employer of choice. This is especially important among IT professionals of whom as many as 68% are considered to be passive candidates who do not browse offers, but are at the same time open to accept challenging job postings passed via networking and recruitment portals.
The platform builds a community and facilitates recruitment processes
The ChallengeRocket.com platform is a tool directed at both students and graduates, as well as employees of HR departments and recruitment teams representing large enterprises. Its goal is to build an online talent community that strives to develop its technical skills. ChallengeRocket.com organises cyclical competitions for platform users and identifies their skills on the basis of suggested solutions. An innovative AI talent analytics module builds automatically user competency profiles, creating a database of verified specialists that can be used directly by HR departments for their recruitment purposes.
The platform also organises custom-made challenges with patronages from specific companies. The presented tasks are adapted to the staffing needs of these organisations. The use of artificial intelligence helps, as the solutions proposed by users do not have to be manually verified by experts from employing companies.
“Employers in Poland and abroad use our platform both to directly attract the best candidates and to build the image of an attractive employer. Everything is done using the ‘online challenges’ formula, that confirms one’s competences in various fields – currently mainly in the areas related to new technologies, data analysis, engineering sciences and programming,” says Tomasz Florczak, co-founder and CTO at ChallengeRocket.com.
The tool also increases the efficiency of recruiters.
“This is a new technique that allows significant improvement in the level of key indicators for HR departments such as the number and quality of acquired candidates, as well as the average cost and time to close an open position,” adds Paweł Kwiatkowski, co-founder and CEO at ChallengeRocket.com.
ChallengeRocket.com is already present on European markets. The funds obtained from the EEC Magenta Fund will be allocated for further commercial development of the platform, sales support, entering the British and American markets, as well as for further R&D works. ChallengeRocket.com clients are corporations, including American technology giant nVidia, banks such as ING and Santander, PZU, Asseco, but also universities and public sector companies.
“ChallengeRocket.com, despite the relatively short presence on the market, has an effective organisational structure that allows the company’s founders to focus on strategic issues. It is a start-up that aptly diagnosed the problem of the competence gap on the market and proposed a solution that worked well in business practice. The organisation already has experience in working with corporations, including those on international markets. This is why the EEC Magenta Fund decided to make an investment of PLN 3.2 million in ChallengeRocket.com,” comments Rafał Małecki, Partner at EEC Ventures. “ChallengeRocket.com has already won a number of significant awards, presented, among others, during the ABSL, European Start-up Days gala or a distinction in the Startup Session Elite category at the Economic Forum in Krynica. The company also won the international Facebook Global Challenge competition, which is undoubtedly an argument for in favour our investment,” he adds.
The investment in ChallengeRocket.com is financed from two funds that are part of EEC Magenta: the Starter Fund, which invests in projects at an early stage of development, as well as the largest Corporate Venture Capital fund in Poland that finances more mature companies.
EEC Magenta invests again The EEC Magenta Fund has already had two start-ups in its portfolio: TakeTask – a process management platform, which was supported by the amount of approx. PLN 2 million, and Reliability Solutions, a company that develops predictive diagnostic systems in modern industry, supported by the amount PLN 13 million. The ChallengeRocket.com platform is now the third company in which EEC Magenta has invested. All existing investments are part of the Fund’s strategy which is based on financing solutions in the field of automation and robotisation as well as increasing the efficiency of enterprises.