Sapia.ai Closes $17 Million Series A To Pursue Workplace Equity

Australian Dollars

Sapia.ai, the Australia-based developer of Smart Chat Interviewer, raised $17 million in a Series A round led by Macquaire Capital and Woolworths Group’s W23 venture capital arm. In a statement, the developer said the funding will be used to continue its overseas expansion, including offering its product in multiple languages.

Macquarie Capital co-founder Dan Phillips said his team had been impressed by the technology solution Sapai.ai has created, and how it’s using AI to offer a better way for companies to approach and solve diversity and inclusion issues.

Sapia.ai closed a $17 million Series A round to continue overseas expansion, including offering its product in multiple languages. #HR #HRTech Click To Tweet

“We’ve all been talking about the value of diversity for some time, but many companies are still not equipped to bring about real change. This is primarily because we fail to acknowledge our human biases,” Phillips said. Sapia’s Product is blind, efficient and backed by peer-reviewed science, he said.”

Sapia.ai founder and CEO Barb Hyman said the new investment was a validation of the effort the company’s team has put into its products.  

Long Road to DEI?

The investment comes as a recent study by talent acquisition suite Lever found that experience bias during the hiring process hindered them in securing employment. Fully half, 50%, of employees believe their race, gender or ethnicity was an issue during the process. 

Another recent study by Salary.com found that the gap between what companies intend to do to address DEI and what they are actually doing narrowed by 1.2% in 2022. Last year, a report by the UK’s Workforce Disclosure Initiative concluded that despite increasing social, political and investor pressure, just 19% of the world’s largest companies have disclosed data about the makeup of their workforce,

Meanwhile, reporting for the HCM Technology Report found there are several measures that company management need to put in place or act on to retain diversity in their workplaces.

Image: 123RF

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