We are thrilled to announce that we have invested in Roi-AI, an automation-focused technology solution built specifically to enable recruitment agencies and corporate talent acquisition teams to win the war for talent.
What does Roi-AI do?
Roi-AI is an automation platform built for the recruitment and talent acquisition sectors. Its purpose is to enable recruiters to generate more revenue from their own candidate databases, through automation and multi-channel communications.
The team at Roi-AI founded the company with one goal in mind, to create an automation product that offers recruitment agencies a true return on their investment.
Privately funded through a group of recruitment industry entrepreneurs, Roi-AI has quickly become one of the market-leading providers of marketing and business process automation to the recruitment sector, with an established presence in five countries.
Why did Scalare invest?
The problem
As the war for talent escalates, existing candidate databases become increasingly valuable. Changing work patterns and behaviours have led to a more mobile workforce that seeks out jobs opportunistically. Recruiters have huge amounts of data, but no easy way to access it or keep it up to date. Roi-AI helps them to monetise the value of their own data by enhancing it with an accessible, easy-to-use, industry-specific automation and multi-channel communication tool.
Talent Shortages
With the Australian market facing a significant shortage of talent (a 57% year-on-year increase in Australian job ads, source: Seek Australia 2021), it’s a battle for recruiters to find good candidates and this makes having quality candidate data invaluable.
Technology Limitations
Recruitment databases tend to be static, historical, and difficult to search. Recruiters revert to expensive job adverts and LinkedIn searches instead of using their own data. The average candidate database size of Roi-AI customers in January 2023 was over 68,000 candidates.
The Solution
Roi-AI describes its technology as ‘HubSpot for Recruitment Databases’ as, similar to HubSpot, it offers both automation and multi-channel communication tools, however, uniquely it integrates into existing recruitment platforms; allowing previously manual functions to be completed faster and at far less cost.
With Roi-AI’s automation function, recruiters can say goodbye to tedious database searches for information gaps, and keep the pool of candidate information up to date and ready for recruiter matches. Customer care is also made easy with automations triggering surveys on the recruitment process, verifying start dates and guarantee periods, conducting one-year checks, and more. The system also enables features such as headhunting sequences, sending birthday notes, managing contract extensions, classifying contractors for talent pools, and triggering events based on chosen workflows determined by the recruiter.
Here's a quick explainer video, produced in conjunction with reseller partner JobAdder (1.5 minutes, no sound).
Market Opportunity
Globally, the recruitment industry is worth a whopping $7bn USD. Roi-AI have identified an educated market that is hungry for automation to make them more competitive, with a combined serviceable market across Australia/NZ, UK/Ireland, and USA/Canada of NZD $166m ARR.
The Founder/Team
Roi-AI Co-Founder and CEO Chris South has a recruitment background, building sizeable teams in the US and NZ, before moving into marketing, where he spent nearly 10 years growing what is now a successful global recruitment-focused marketing agency.
Chris is supported by a team of recruitment industry veterans and established technology entrepreneurs. Engineering Manager Nathanuel Mills brings a wealth of software development experience to the team, and Scot Rowe contributes both recruitment and software experience to head up Customer Success.
Roi-AI’s board includes seasoned recruitment and business owners Co-Founder Scott Brittenden and Adviser Tim Phillipps, ex-Deloitte Global Analytics Managing Partner, RegTech strategy advisor and ASX-listed company chair.
Scalare Partner Tim Griffiths will become a Board Director and Advisor to Roi-AI to support Chris and team with their growth and development plans.
The Product/technology
Commercial Model
Revenue is a combination of the annual or monthly subscription plus additional fees based on the volume of email and SMS usage, plus any one-off training or customisation fees.
Roi-AI’s business model is a typical B2B SaaS model with two commercial streams:
1. Partnerships with large global database providers
Chris’ team already have a relationship with one of the largest global recruitment databases which includes a reseller agreement of Roi-AI’s software, enabling them to deliver full automation to their customer base. Roi-AI forecast an ARR of $1.3m NZD by December 2023.
Additionally, Roi-AI is negotiating with other international providers that will give additional, instant worldwide distribution at a very low cost of sale.
2. Direct Customers
These are direct SaaS B2B recruitment customers who want to extract more benefit from their own candidate data, including all sizes of recruitment businesses and corporate talent acquisition teams.
Investment & Engagement
Opting to invest in Roi-AI, Scalare secured an investor from our network to complete the funding round and support Roi-AI's mission to become the technology behind top recruiting platforms, facilitating seamless communication and data-driven value creation for recruiters and candidates.
Scalare will be working closely with Roi-AI to deliver support in a range of business areas.
If you wish to discuss further, please contact Scalare Partner Tim Griffiths for an introduction.
About Scalare
At Scalare, we’re on a mission to create a greater impact by building a collaborative network that connects exceptional founders, advisors and investors in a unique and powerful partnership, because real transformation and growth takes more than money.
Our unique collaboration and partnership model provides clear pathways to global investors, experts and markets. We plug existing skills gaps in our portfolio companies from our best-of-breed advisor network – to bring, expert resources exactly when needed to facilitate growth and deliver exceptional returns to investors and founders alike. Find out more >
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