HackerRank is a technology hiring platform that is the standard for assessing developer skills for over 3,000+ companies around the world. By enabling tech recruiters and hiring managers to objectively evaluate talent at every stage of the recruiting process, HackerRank helps companies hire skilled developers and innovate faster!
business customers
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daily skill assessments
Our story
The journey to HackerRank first began in July 2009, when computer science graduates Vivek and Hari worked at Amazon and IBM (respectively) for about a year in Bangalore. Both were on interview panels, inundated with endless hours of resume reviews, phone screens, and onsite interviews. Unqualified people were making it to the onsite, while some of their most capable, hardworking friends were passed on because of their GPA or lack of a prestigious degree.
That’s when they noticed a massive problem—and opportunity—in the technical recruiting system. They quit their jobs to build InterviewStreet, a website that matched mentors with students. Within a few weeks, hundreds of students signed up across a dozen universities. They received their first cheque for 413.62 INR ($5.68). A copy exists in the Bangalore office and underneath, it says “Humble Beginnings.”
Vivek and Hari raised Series A of $3 million, led by Khosla Ventures in September 2011. Within a year, they pivoted to building a platform that helps companies identify the right developers based on the results on coding challenges. Early customers who tried out the coding challenges included Airbnb, Box, and Amazon. Thus began Vivek and Hari's pursuit of a larger mission: matching every developer to the right job.
Without even spending $1 on marketing to developers, the HackerRank community organically grew to 1,000,000 developers by February 2015. We continued to invest in helping developers by expanding challenges to a variety of different technical tracks, like SQL challenges, tutorial challenges, and more. These new challenges doubled down on helping developers improve their skills by matching developer skill proficiency to the right challenges.
Indeed, a subsidiary of Recruit Holdings led HackerRank's Series B round of funding for a total of $9.2M in July 2015. Other participants in this round include Motorola Mobility VP Peeyush Ranjan, former Facebook Senior Director of Engineering Greg Badros, and Facebook Director of Product Management Dan Rubinstein. Recruit Holdings later infused an additional $7.8M.
2015 was a big year for HackerRank! By September, we expanded beyond US and India to launch HackerRank into a new geographical market. We hired our first EMEA lead and opened our London office, which helps serve companies based out of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
The demand for HackerRank to identify the right developer skills has grown in tandem with the demand for software engineers. Our first customers were primarily in technology (like Airbnb, Dropbox). By December 2016, our customer base not only grew to over 1,000 companies but also prevailed across several verticals, from auto to retail to finance. In fact, 5 out of 8 of the top banks in America rely on HackerRank to evaluate developer candidates.
HackerRank’s developer community grew 3x by May 2017. This growth is a testament to our product and engineering teams, dedication to producing high-quality coding challenges, curation of inclusive events, and commitment to putting the developer experience first.
In February 2018, we raised a $30 million Series C funding round led by JMI Equity, a fund that specializes in helping software companies scale. Existing investors Khosla Ventures, Battery Ventures, Randstad and Chartline Capital Partners also participated in this round.
The goal with this new round of funding is focused on HackerRank’s go-to-market strategy, investing more in its community, and using machine learning and data science to better match employer and job seekers.
In March of 2022, we announced a $60 million Series D round of financing, led by Susquehanna Growth Equity, to help us extend our assessment capabilities for technical skills in emerging areas like machine learning, blockchain, and crypto.
We’re also expanding support for assessments beyond software development, including skills in hardware, design and QA, as well as soft skills to better evaluate attributes increasingly valued among distributed teams.
Today, HackerRank is the authority on all things developer skills — and how to best assess them. Every second, two developers around the world submit code as part of a HackerRank assessment. With over 188 million data points on technical skill assessments and more than 18 million developers in our community, we are poised to transform the way developers are hired the world over.
Join the revolution! Let's move away from traditional, resume-based hiring in favor of skills-based hiring.