Talent intelligence technology provider Censia announced this week that it has raised US$21 million in a Series A round chaired by Sydney-based Marbruck investments, bringing the company's total valuation to US$30 million. Marbruck joins existing investors Streamlined Ventures, CXO Fund, Merus Capital, and CerraCap.

According to the announcement, Censia will use this funding for expansion of go-to-market efforts, promulgating innovations in products for talent acquisition, broadening the scale of their first offering of API and planning the layout of the workforce, and powering the technologies of the future of AI. It also launched a developer resources site for its API offering.

Censia was founded in 2017 by Joanna Riley and Tim Johnson with the objective of resolving the unconscious bias that prevents the right talent from getting the opportunities they deserve, thus making up for the talent shortage.

"How we recruit, hire and promote is uninformed, subjective, and manual. Censia is changing that by democratizing talent information around the world," said Joanna Riley, CEO and Co-founder at Censia. "By building a Talent Intelligence Platform that contextualizes billions of data points on public and proprietary data, Censia enables enterprises to make bias-free data-driven people decisions. It is a win-win for business and humanity."

Censia has currently established collaborations with many leading and powerful HR systems, which includes names like Workday, iCIMs, SAP SuccessFactors, Recruiter.com, Jobvite, Greenhouse, Phenom, Lever, and Smart Recruiter.

"The need for Talent Intelligence technology in the current market landscape is overwhelming," said Ullas Naik, Founder and General Partner of Streamlined Ventures, "Teams need a way to do more with less, increase their productivity, and stay on top of new and emerging skills. Censia is poised to provide huge value for businesses guiding them with data needed to accomplish that and more."

Through the past year, Censia has grown over 10 times which has continued this year as well. The drastic and sporadic transformations in the talent market have made companies evaluate and rethink their talent sourcing and management tactics. According to a McKinsey report analysis, digital transformation has been set in place for 7 years, accompanied by an exponential increase in the need for new and in-demand digital skill-sets. There are some issues as well like unemployment caused by pandemics and a recent trend of post-pandemic mass migration of employees. Achiever's report states that up to 52% of employees are seeking new jobs in 2021. The outcome of this development is the overwhelming amount of incoming applications sent to the hiring teams amidst a mushrooming talent shortage and a rise in concentration and occupation of candidate diversity. HR leaders are hopeful that technology will be helpful in providing solutions to this growing concern.