Turing, Intelligent Talent Cloud, announced that it has attained unicorn status after raising $87 million at a valuation of about $1.1 billion. The Series D financing was led by WestBridge Capital with participation from Foundation Capital, along with new investor StepStone Group.
WestBridge Capital is a $7 billion fund with deep expertise across SaaS and IT services and has invested in global IT services companies such as Cognizant Technology Solutions and Global Logic. With $4 billion under management, Foundation Capital has invested in companies including Netflix, Uber, and Solana. StepStone Group is a $22 billion late-stage growth equity fund with investments in leading talent clouds such as WorkRise (RigUp) and Trusted Health.
Other investors in the round include AltaIR Capital, HR Tech Investments LLC (an affiliate of Indeed), Brainstorm Ventures, Frontier Ventures, Modern Venture Partners, and Plug and Play Scale Fund. The unicorn round brings Turing’s total raised capital to over $140 million. This round was heavily oversubscribed; Turing has since opened a SAFE at a $4 billion valuation cap which is now also oversubscribed.
Turing has grown its developer pool over 17x within the last 12 months after raising its Series B in December 2020, adding marquee customers Johnson & Johnson, Coinbase, Rivian, Dell, Disney, Plume, and VillageMD. With more than one million developers from 140 countries, Turing’s exponential growth has helped award the company the number one spot in the highly competitive B2B category for The Information’s 2021 50 Most Promising Startups list.
“Our mission is to unleash the world’s untapped human potential,” said Jonathan Siddharth, Founder & CEO of Turing. “We now live in a remote-first world, and every company is in a race to reap the benefits of global engineering talent. The future is remote distributed global teams.”
The reasons are apparent. Companies can access a planetary pool of engineers and access hundreds of thousands of untapped Silicon Valley calibre developers. The inspiration for Turing came to repeat entrepreneurs Jonathan Siddharth & Vijay Krishnan from their experience scaling their first startup Rover, which was also built remote-first and successfully acquired in 2017.
“Turing’s growth has been nothing short of phenomenal,” said Sumir Chadha, Managing Director of WestBridge Capital. “Over the past two decades, we have invested in and witnessed the creation of massive companies in offshore development across the globe. Turing is pioneering the new era of such companies with machine learning and automation at the core.”
However, the remote is tricky. Legacy solutions are simply not built for a remote-first world. A traditional hiring process takes months, and engineering leaders spend up to 40 per cent of their time hiring. The standard options are IT services companies, staffing agencies, or recruiting marketplaces that manually source from local pools with no specialised vetting for engineers. This leads to long timelines for filling roles and renders companies incapable of attracting the best talent.
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Turing’s Intelligent Talent Cloud solves this multi-trillion-dollar tech talent problem by combining planetary reach and AI to deliver ideal engineers billed by the month. Its software sources vetted talent planet-wide, optimises matching via AI, abstracts away the complexity of compliance and onboarding, and makes it easy for managers and developers to collaborate.
This eliminates the need for a customer’s engineering team to do interviews, saving 50+ hours of engineering interviewing time per hire with a 97 per cent matching success rate. In effect, Turing helps companies spin up their engineering dream team in the cloud as quickly as spinning up servers on Amazon AWS.
“Turing’s ambitious vision of enabling fantastic opportunities for developers across the globe is inspiring,” said John Avirett, partner at StepStone Group. “The Intelligent Talent Cloud truly is a remarkable way to democratise access and make lasting connections beyond inking the contract; they’re cultivating the process into long term career planning for the individual and the companies who use them.”
Currently, the company supports 15 different job types and more than 100 different technologies. Their advanced vetting engine builds a deep, dynamic profile for every developer. Deep matching intelligence finds the best engineer for every role — and shows you why. After the match, Turing makes remote development easy, compliant and secure. The remote-first company takes care of global HR, payroll, developer support, and enforcement of each customer’s security protocols.
“Turing is productising every leg of a massive industry and has forever changed its face and perception going forward,” said Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital, who led the seed round in Turing in 2020 and has participated in every round since.
“The way we work has fundamentally changed. With the world’s shift to remote work and the talent cloud, we are entering a golden era for the tech industry. You can now work in silicon valley without needing to live in silicon valley. Talent is universal. Now, the opportunity is too.” said Siddharth.
