The race to crown a winner in the AI-powered recruiting software space is on. With both Workey and Mya nabbing rounds in the last few weeks, the timing is prime for a few players to seek advantage in the form of growth capital. This seems to be exactly what Entelo, a six-year-old player in the space, is doing. The company is announcing a $20 million Series C round of financing today led byU.S. Venture Partners with Battery Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Correlation Ventures participating.

Entelo crawls the internet to automatically generate profiles of potential hiring prospects. The company then works to match prospects to its enterprise customers looking to identify and recruit top talent. Unlike LinkedIn, Entelo doesnt currently let individuals create their own accounts. Instead, all operations happen in the background, with the exception of opt-out controls that allow anyone to request their profile be deleted at any time.

Jon Bischke, CEO of Entelo, told me that his priority for the company is improving the matching process that occurs behind the scenes. Accomplishing this will require Entelo to both collect additional unstructured data from non-traditional sources like GitHub and implement additional machine learning capabilities to allow enterprises to quickly identify and target top candidates.

Entelo faces competition from both sides of the market younger AI-first startups and legacy players like LinkedIn. For the time being, it behooves enterprises to take an everything but the kitchen sink approach to gain an edge in recruiting, but that mentality might not last forever.

Bischke believes his positioning best prepares Entelo to thrive when the dust settles. He told me in an interview that without adequate data many AI-first HR startups will struggle. On the other side of the equation, LinkedIn has a lot of work ahead of it to remain innovative in the midst of apotentially distracting acquisition.

To date, Entelo has signed over 600 companies up for its platform. These businesses includeFacebook, GE, Northrop Grumman, and Target. The company will be looking to hire additional data scientists and to add to its sales team moving forward.

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