Manchester-based psychometric assessment provider, Arctic Shores recently announced that it has raised USD $7 million (about €6.4 million) in its Series B funding. The round was led by Praetura Ventures, with participation from existing shareholder Beringea. Helen Verwoert, operational partner at Praetura Ventures and ex-chief people officer at Dr. Martens, and Alexander Crawford, Co-Head of Investments, at Calculus Capital, will join the board.
With the new fundraising, the company plans to accelerate the development of its soft-skills assessment and international expansion, specifically in Europe.
Founded in 2014 by Robert Newry and Safe Hammad, Arctic Shores is a company providing a psychometric assessment that uses behavioural tasks and captures responses to determine personality traits which reveal potential. The platform helps organisations hire for potential, widen talent pools and unearth high-quality candidates, in any economic climate. Its behavioural assessment solution is proven to reduce the barriers to entry for talent, increase candidate excellence, and save time, and money. Collecting 10,000+ data points from an engaging interface, the application ranks which candidates are most suited to a role in a company.
Speaking about the capital raised, Co-founder & CEO of Arctic Shores, Robert Newry, said:
This next phase of investment will help Arctic Shores to realise its mission to help companies see more in people and transform recruitment so that potential will count as much as hard skills or experience.
Newry further added:
Companies are being squeezed by a lack of specific skills which is driving up salaries and recruitment costs. On top of that, there is a cohort of experienced workers soon to retire, and an increasingly digitised economy creating many new roles for which no prior experience exists. If companies recruit in the same way they have always done, then they will fail. Arctic Shores gives businesses a unique and proven way to escape this experience trap by assessing potential so that companies can train up the skills. Companies like PwC, Siemens and Airbus are leading the way into the future by recognising that the CV is no longer fit for purpose and adopting a soft skills centric hiring approach.
Arctic Shores believes that recruiters should move away from hiring purely based on candidate experience, and instead focus on potential. The firm claims to have helped household names like Vitality, PwC, Thales, TalkTalk and Arcadis, objectively assess more than 3 million candidates worldwide, while at the same time improving their quality of hire and reducing their cost of hire.
Commenting on the latest development, Operational Partner, Praetura Ventures, Helen Verwoert, said:
The recruitment landscape is changing rapidly. The challenges employers face today are fundamentally different to those we’ve seen in previous years. And new challenges need new tools. As we scaled the team at Dr. Martens, we constantly looked for new and innovative ways to help us develop our edge in the ‘race for talent’. Arctic Shores’ platform gives its clients that edge by broadening the talent pool, hiring based on real skills and removing bias from outdated practices. I look forward to supporting them with Praetura’s More Than Money promise as they continue to grow.
The investment will accelerate the adoption of Arctic Shores’ new self-configure platform, and the launch of an innovative update to assessing workplace intelligence. Following growth in Germany including major contracts with Airbus Siemens and Schneider Electric, the investment will further Arctic Shores’ European presence and market capability to accelerate in this region.
Last year in January, Arctic Shores raised £1.5 million in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank UK. Prior to that, the startup had secured $5.5 million as a part of its Series A funding round led by Beringea, the transatlantic venture capital investor, with participation from existing shareholders including Candy Ventures in 2019.
