Torre on its way to taking on LinkedIn after closing US$5 million seed round

Contxto — The right email arriving at the right time can make even the saddest person grin at their phone. Yesterday night, Torre—a professional network for job finding and recruitment—knocked on my inbox and greeted me with intriguing news.

According to their latest Q2 investor report, the company has officially closed (and oversubscribed) its US$5 million seed round.

The round’s investment stack includes mostly angel investors such as Diego Piacentini,—former VP of Amazon and Apple—, Mike Shoemaker— former Global Director of Product Operations at Uber—, Rodrigo Schmidt—senior Head of Engineering at Instagram—, Brian Requarth—founder of Viva Real—, as well as MatterScale Ventures. 

Growth, not despite, but due to contingency

According to the report, the company continued “growing most of [their] metrics during the pandemic”. It certainly helps that Torre’s main bet is remote work, of course. But let’s go step by step. 

Torre.co is a recruiting and talent search platform that uses matching algorithms to enable the most optimal pairing of candidates and companies.

The self-proclaimed “new professional network for remote and flexible work” goes deep into job seekers’ abilities, interests, and even professional reputation to assign them a “professional genome”. It allows them to find better, more fulfilling jobs for their applicants. 

Andrés Cajiao, Chief Growth Officer at Torre—and apparently a Contxto reader himself—wrote to us over email:

“As Antti Kulppi, CEO of ComunidadFeliz, states in one of your most recent articles, the biggest challenge for organizations continues to be talent. If you want to hire the best professionals, developers, engineers, and marketers, it takes a next-generation partner that helps you break through the noise.” 

Andrés believes Torre is quickly positioning itself to become that partner for organizations across the world. 

To take advantage of the current situation, the company is postponing their expansion to other regional markets, to focus further on remote work. Nevertheless, it is now increasingly experimenting with other job roles including marketing, sales and customer service, as well as new modalities such as internships and freelance. 

“At the core of our 2+ years developing, Torre has always been remote work. The pandemic accelerated its adoption from what we had projected to be 10 years to a couple of months, and fortunately, our team has been up to the challenge,” said Torre CEO, Alexander Torrenegra.

Love this Covid-fueled growth. 

Professional Genome and programmatic recruiting

The company is already receiving more than 20,000 job postings each month and it’s strongly betting on the professional genome and its “PageRank-like” algorithm to optimize the job and candidate search moving forward.

You can build your own Genome here.

According to Torrenegra, the future of recruiting includes machine learning that enables what he calls “programmatic recruiting”. This means that there’s data behind a candidate’s education, experience, personality, and more that can match it with talent seekers.

Head-to-head against the big boys

Now, what’s interesting is that despite LinkedIn’s and Indeed’s success, Torre believes there are still flaws within the networking and recruiting system worldwide. 

We could say that the company is effectively going head-to-head against the incumbents of the industry.

“Linkedin, as large as it is, only has one in six people of working age. Out of those only 20 percent are active. That means that there are 4 billion people that don’t have a professional digital profile that helps them find better work,” says Torrenegra in their About Us video.

I don’t know about you, but I love the challenger cycle. Remember when Netflix was the budding company trying to beat Blockbuster and past industry incumbents? Well, turns out Netflix is now the incumbent every new company is trying to beat. I guess Torre’s going straight for LinkedIn’s neck. 

Let me go grab my corn…

—VC