Only have 1 minute? Here are 3 key takeaways from the piece:
• Bulgarian HR startup nPloy raises €1.8M in a round led by Morningside Hill VC and joined by Blue Ocean Ventures.
• The follow-on investment is in addition to last year’s round when the company raised €2M, which it used to expand to the Romanian market.
• The nPloy app functions similarly to the popular dating app Tinder – it allows candidates and employers to swipe left and right depending on whether they want to match with each other.
Founded in 2019 by entrepreneurs Konstantin Tzonev, Boris Kolev, Tsvetoslav Zahariev, and later Teodor Todorov, nPloy provides talents and job seekers with a tool that matches their lifestyle and communication preferences and connects them with suitable employers.
When creating their profile in nPloy, employees and candidates set their requirements and let the algorithms do the rest of the job to match them. The app also improves the traditional job application process by allowing candidates to only see the positions thatare suitable for their experience and preferences. On the other hand, it allows employers to only see the candidates who are suitable for the position.
The nPloy app also has social features that allow users to engage in discussions about their professional interests, and there are also different clubs where users can create and engage in common topics, and events sections for online workshops and seminars.
“We see great potential in the company, the team is doing great, and that’s why we decided to make a follow-up investment in it. The expansion of the Romanian market is going very well and we hope it will be the same in other markets outside the country,” Morningside Hill VC’s managing partner Pavel Velkov told Forbes Bulgaria. The Bulgarian fund is also closing its funding cycle at the end of 2023 due to the Fund of Funds (FoF) also nearing its investment cycle at the end of the year.
According to Velkov, the nPloy platform will continue to develop its tech on the market, which may already signal a need for a new round worth up to €10 million. Additionally, the company’s expectations are that in the next 2 years, the candidate base will increase by over 300 percent in Bulgaria and tenfold in Romania.
“This follow-on investment in nPloy is a step forward in our development and key to achieving our ambitious goals. Our strategy for the next 2 years includes a number of initiatives and technological innovations, with which we expect our candidate base to grow many times, as well as to enter the next new market. We will not stop introducing more and more innovations, with which we not only facilitate the selection process, but also provide strategic analysis of trends and make the labor market more and more transparent and accessible”, nPloy’s co-founder Konstantin Tzonev said.
