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Conversational AI developer Mya Systems today announced that it has secured $18.75 million in a series C round. Notion Capital participated in the round, along with earlier investors Foundation Capital, Emergence Capital, and Workday Ventures. Mya founder and CEO Eyal Grayevsky said the new funds will allow the company to grow in the coming years as it helps customers automate the employee sourcing process.
Mya guides candidates through the hiring experience from job search and onboarding to career advancement. It reactivates profiles within employers’ databases to attract best-fit candidates for open roles and augments career sites by suggesting relevant openings to job seekers. And Mya engages with applicants to initiate the screening process, answer questions they might have, assess eligibility, and deliver a ranked shortlist to recruiters. It also automates scheduling, providing ongoing updates and reminders while managing rescheduling and cancellations.
The company also provides a platform for real-time feedback and engagement to help identify and reduce turnover risk. Specifically, it helps workers advance in their careers by connecting with them before the end of their contract and matching them with new job opportunities.
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On the AI and machine learning side of the equation, Mya captures meaningful information using semantic parsing, named entity recognition, and multiple intent classification. It can understand context, multi-part statements, changed answers, and interjections and can shift the direction of conversations to an intended goal. It does all this while handling various languages, idiomatic phrases, and slang across messaging channels (e.g., SMS and WhatsApp). The algorithms underpinning these capabilities continuously learn from millions of interactions, according to Grayevsky, enabling Mya to constantly improve the accuracy of its responses and the breadth of its knowledge.
Mya works with existing hiring products, including calendars, job boards, talent communities, messaging apps, and more from technology providers like Bullhorn, Workday, Greenhouse, SmartRecruiters, and SAP SuccessFactors. Grayevsky claims the tech and platform have achieved an average 93% screen completion rate and 79% time-to-interview reduction, with a 2.5 times increase in funnel conversion and a 144% gain in recruiter productivity. Mya says it has also helped schedule over 400,000 interviews with qualified candidates.
A number of startups are leveraging AI and automation to streamline the recruitment process, including New York-based Fetcher, which crunches data to proactively headhunt new candidates; San Francisco’s Xor, which uses AI for recruitment and screening; and New York-based Pymetrics, which helps companies carry out candidate assessments through neuroscience games. There’s also Phenom People, a human resources platform that leverages AI to help companies attract new talent, and Headstart, which aims to tackle recruitment bias in part through the use of AI.
For its part, Notion Capital investment director Itxaso del Palacio says Mya has gained “tremendous momentum” in the past year alone, with 3 times customer subscription growth. Mya now supports over 460 brands, six of the eight largest staffing agencies, and 29 of the Fortune 100 companies, with customers ranging from Hays and Comfort Keepers to Adecco, L’Oreal, Deloitte, and Anheuser-Busch.
Today’s round brings the company’s total raised to over $50 million. Mya is headquartered in San Francisco and has just over 80 employees (up from 20 employees as of May 2017).
