Mount Pleasant startup Engage Talent has raised $3 million from a group of out-of-state venture capital firms, including a fund formed by AOL co-founder Steve Case, the company announced Wednesday.
Refinery Ventures of Ohio and Grand Ventures of Michigan led the round, The Post and Courier reported. Engage is one of nine startups nationwide to win financing from the Rise of the Rest fund, which Case’s venture firm, Revolution, formed last year to back startups based outside traditional technology hubs such as San Francisco.
“Its technology has tremendous potential for helping employers recruit and hire more successfully,” said J.D. Vance, the fund’s managing partner and the author of “Hillbilly Elegy.” Vance called Engage a great example of the kind of company the fund wants: one in an emerging startup scene that uses technology to solve a real-world problem.
Engage sells software meant to help businesses find workers before those workers start looking for a new job, chief executive Joseph Hanna told the newspaper. It keeps a database of workers and their skills and looks for signs that they may be ready to move, such as layoffs or financial turmoil at their employers. The product has caught on mostly in engineering, finance, health care and technology.
The company plans to use the money to invest in its technology, expand its sales force and build a customer support team. It has 18 employees and is based on Shem Creek.
Engage was founded in 2014 as Job Market Maker and has raised $6.5 million in total. In 2016 it released a product called Engage Talent and later shifted its emphasis to that product, the Post and Courier has reported. The company now goes by that name.
Case visited Charleston in May 2015 on his Rise of the Rest bus tour, when he invested $100,000 in a Mount Pleasant startup that won a pitch contest aboard the aircraft carrier Yorktown.
