Freelance tech community ‘expertlead’ raises €7m in Series A funding to scale its business
Acton Capital Partners and SEEK have joined Rocket Internet as investors in the round
expertlead positioned to support tech professionals through all stages of their career and connect businesses to highly skilled, hard to find talent
Berlin, 25th of June 2019. expertlead, a global community of highly qualified tech freelancers, has raised €7m in Series A funding led by growth investor Acton Capital with participation from strategic investor SEEK and renewed investment from company builder Rocket Internet.
Founded in January 2018, expertlead’s mission is to support freelance tech professionals in all stages of self-employment: from project acquisition and client management to continued professional development, peer-to-peer learning and administrative tasks.
expertlead vets and selects the world's best senior developers, data science experts, experienced product/project managers as well as proficient UI/UX designers. Together with its community, expertlead has developed proprietary coding tests and a thorough technical interview process. The combination of both testing methods is the core of its community’s reputation for excellence and continued success.
Building on these capabilities, expertlead aims to relieve companies from lengthy and complex candidate quality screening processes - providing them with access to a global pool of highly qualified tech freelancers and enabling these companies’ tech teams to successfully deliver their tech roadmaps. expertlead's clients range from leading multinationals such as Lufthansa, Daimler and Deutsche Bank, as well as numerous tech companies and startups.
"We founded expertlead in order to bring together the best tech freelancers and to further promote their professional development through knowledge exchange and challenging projects. We work together with our highly skilled community to continuously optimise our qualification process for our newer members.
For our corporate clients, we not only identify and technically evaluate the most suitable candidates or fully-fledged team that matches their projects’ needs but also take care of project administration. This enables our clients to fully focus on building and shipping products in the most time and cost effective way.
Because we rely heavily on algorithm-based solutions for all our processes, we can work much faster and in a more precise manner than others." explains co-founder Alexander Schlomberg.
The newly raised capital will be used to support expertlead’s international growth ambitions as well as to further the automation of its products.
Co-founder Arne Hosemann says on the successful financing round: "We are very pleased to have three strong investors supporting expertlead: Acton Capital, SEEK and Rocket Internet. As a leading VC in the HR and digital sector, we see Acton not only as an investor but also as an experienced partner who will help us develop into a strong HR tech company. As an operator and investor of online platforms across the employment and education market, SEEK’s knowledge in the online HR sector and operational know-how is second to none and will greatly benefit us in our internationalisation plans. In addition, we are proud to have Rocket Internet returning on this round - their continued support and expertise in scaling digital business models has been invaluable.”
Fritz Oidtmann, Managing Partner at Acton Capital: "A company's ability to innovate is largely determined by its access to qualified IT specialists. expertlead closes the gap here between the increasing need of IT professionals to work as freelancers and companies that are desperately looking for the right expertise for increasingly complex IT projects. We see global growth potential in all industries in view of the increasing digitalisation pressure."
Since its launch in 2018, the expertlead team has grown rapidly: the international startup, headquartered in Berlin, now employs around 40 people. In addition to the team, expertlead is backed by the two founders Arne Hosemann and Alexander Schlomberg, who previously worked for several years for the management consultancies Bain & Company and McKinsey.