HR organizations face a growing skills gap, economic headwinds and changing job expectations. It’s no surprise, then, that burnout and burnout are prevalent in HR, with a survey finding that 42% of teams struggle under the weight of too many projects and responsibilities.

Change starts with staff and management, some would say. Others who are more technoutopian might offer HR technology as a solution. While there is some dissatisfaction with HR tech vendors (at least according to some data), to be fair to the tech-positive crowd, many companies see real value in HR tech. According to a recent Sapient report, more than half of companies with more than 500 employees plan to increase their HR technology spending by an average of 21% in the coming year.

One of the beneficiaries of this increased spending is Beamery, a London-based startup developing a talent lifecycle management platform. Beamery today announced that it has raised $50 million in a Series D funding round that values ​​the company at $1 billion, bringing the total raised by the company to date to $228 million.

Teachers’ Ventures Growth (TVG), part of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, led the round. “I think Beamery is well positioned to win because it provides a solution you can rely on through different economic cycles,” TVG’s Avid Larizadeh Duggan said in an emailed statement. “Beamery helps the world’s largest employers with this talent agility and enables them to unlock the potential of their workforce.”

Admittedly, Beamery has grown in popularity this year, increasing its customer base to “hundreds” of businesses and over 25,000 users. Revenue for Fortune 500 clients increased more than 250% from June 2021, when Beamery closed its Series C round, according to the company, while net retention hit 135%.

Founded as Seed Jobs, Beamery uses AI to identify potential candidate matches for open positions. Like many job-matching platforms, Abakar Saidov says Beamery ranks skills based on the industry a company is hiring for and a candidate’s relevant work experience.

“Beamery uses [AI] in our talent lifecycle management platform to give companies the information they need to plan for business needs and gaps, understand the skills and capabilities they have, and attract, retain, develop and redeploy their workforce successfully,” said Abakar Saidov. “[O]Our models are not intended to replace humans; instead, they give relevant information to human decision makers to make better decisions.

Given the increased scrutiny of AI systems that recommend candidates, Abakar Saidov was quick to note that Beamery shows how various factors, including skills, seniority, proficiency, and industry, influence his recommendations and in what measure. Beamery is among the vendors who could be subject to New York City regulation — the Automated Employment Decision Tools Act, set to go into effect in January — that would ban employers from using tools hiring IAs unless a biased audit can show they won’t. discriminate.

Abakar Saidov says Beamery recently completed a third-party audit for the bias of its AI capabilities, which involved “rigorous testing” of the platform’s machine learning models. (Abakar Saidov did not proactively share a copy of the report with TechCrunch; we requested one.) continued basis.

“Within the Beamery platform…itself (i.e. application layer), a key differentiator for us is helping customers achieve their own compliance with myriad global standards for personal data and privacy,” said Abakar Saidov. “We achieve this primarily through the preference center, which allows candidates to control their consent, whether and how companies can contact them, and control how AI is used in relation to their profile.”

Beamery doesn’t exist in a vacuum, of course. Competitors in HR technology software include 15Five, which raised $52 million in July for its talent management solution. There’s also Gloat, a well-capitalized startup building AI-powered internal job markets. Eightfold is among the most formidable, with a valuation of over $2 billion and backing from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, General Catalyst and Lightspeed.

Generally speaking, VCs have shown a willingness to invest money in HR tech startups, even if other segments are underperforming. According to an analysis by WorkTech, the first half of this year saw the world’s second-largest investment in work technologies, reaching $9.4 billion, with $4.6 billion invested in the second quarter alone.

Despite layoffs in the tech sector, job growth has remained resilient despite economic headwinds, driving demand for HR tech — and spawning new vendors as a result.

To stay ahead, since its C-series, Beamery has doubled its analytics capabilities, says Abakar Saidov, introducing a dashboard designed to help companies better understand their workforce by aggregating data on skills across disparate HR systems and tools. The platform also recently rolled out a candidate portal that provides recommendations for jobs as well as the skills they might need to develop their career in their chosen industry. And, building on its acquisition of internal HR sourcing platform Flux, Beamery has launched Beamery Grow, which Abakar Saidov describes as a “talent marketplace solution” to help employees learn new skills and relationships within of their organizations.

“We’re prioritizing enhancements that will make it quick and easy for customers to leverage their talent data for things like agile workforce planning, as well as ensure they have intelligence and real-time insights into their current and future workforce distribution, the skills that exist in their organization, in relation to their business results and the achievement of their diversity, equity and diversity goals. inclusion,” said Abakar Saidov. “The capabilities that a company will need over the next ten years are in many cases very different from those of today, and therefore HR technology solutions must be able to to help companies develop, buy or borrow the skills they need to build a future fit workforce. ”

Beamery currently has 417 employees. Asked about hiring plans, Abakar Saidov said they were “in development”.