We're thrilled to announce that The Swarm has received an investment from 500 Global, a venture capital fund with $2.7B assets under management and 49 unicorns spread across more than 20 countries. This funding will help us scale our capabilities and build the future of network recruiting and propel our vision for Network Relationship Management (NRM).
Giving founders a leg up
Today, the founders that succeed are those that understand the power of networks. They’re the founders who are networking, asking for referrals to fill roles, and learning from others.
Our mission at The Swarm is to bring that power to every company. The Swarm Network Graph allows companies to unite the individual networks of their team members, advisors, and investors into one collected, aggregated hive that can be used to uncover new opportunities for hiring, fundraising, and sales.
We only launched The Swarm in early access in November 2022, but we’ve already onboarded 200 users, with another 1,000 on our waitlist. Our users have already used The Swarm to bring together 300,000+ connections. And we’re only just getting started.
“Recruiting has been getting increasingly challenging over the last decade, due to a shortage of talent in a high-growth environment as well as inefficiencies and high costs,” says Arın Özkula, General Partner at 500 Emerging Europe. “We are very excited to back David and Michal in their journey to enable employees, investors, advisors, and other people in one's close circle to surface the best people from their network.”
New in 2023
We’re bullish about the potential of networks to accelerate companies’ growth, and we’re excited about how our upcoming features will support that vision.
This year, we’ll be rolling out Work Overlaps to The Swarm, letting users import people that worked at the same company at the same time as them to their Network Graph — even if those individuals aren’t directly connected to them or their team team members. This will help startups identify even more potential hires even when their existing teams are smaller.
Throughout the year, we’ll also be focused on growing our Early Stage Program, which offers any startups that are backed by our partners and have under $10M in funding a 30% discount on their first year of membership. The program helps companies within partner funds’ portfolios leverage the power of networks to power their early recruiting, and makes it easier for VC funds to share their networks with their portfolio companies.
Finally, we’ve gotten a ton of great feedback from our early adopters, and so we’ll be hard at work implementing their recommendations into The Swarm.
We wanted to thank 500 Emerging Europe and all of the other investors, advisors, and users that have helped us get to this point. We’re looking forward to continuing to build out network recruiting and can’t wait to see what the year brings.
