Weekday: Supported by Y-Combinator Secures $2.2M Funding

Weekday, a sourcing engine on autopilot that drives seamless hiring through trusted references, today announced it has raised USD 2.2 million in a seed round led by Venture Highway with participation from several influential angel investors. The Y-Combinator-backed startup will be utilizing the funds to bolster its current team thereby enabling more remote hiring. The funds will also be used to deepen Weekday’s footprint in the engineering market and its expansion into other domains.

In the months to come, the startup plans to focus on onboarding more candidates while expanding the company partnerships. By 2025, the team expects to onboard over 250,000 active job seekers and around 2 million passive seekers, backed by peer references for recruiters from 1000+ companies.

Sourcing credible talent while navigating the current landscape of budget constraints and downsizing has become an intricate challenge. The reference check in the hiring process has become a redundant check-off exercise for recruiters. A Weekday’s survey of more than 200 companies’ hiring process indicates that while a majority did a basic background check on candidates (i.e. criminal record or whether they actually worked in their previous organization), less than 5% of companies use reference checks from previous colleagues to make their hiring decisions. This often leads to wrong hires which eventually leads to firing and therefore creating a detrimental cycle to both the employer and the employee.

Founded in 2021 by Amit Singh, Anubav Malik, and Chetan Dalal, Weekday is a sourcing engine that helps with the hiring of engineers vouched by their peers. The platform allows software engineers to connect their social graph (LinkedIn and Contacts) and gives them a readymade shortlist to refer talent to various companies. The experience is gamified while making this unique data of references available for recruiters. Weekday’s “Backchannel” feature hosts multiple people’s references that companies can utilize to get background references (from former colleagues) on every candidate they interact with; making hiring less about resumes and interviews; and more about real-life experiences and capabilities.

For companies, Weekday is a sourcing engine on auto-pilot; where they can not only find candidates but also reach out to them automatically while getting reference checks on them in an instant. After 4 days of signing up, they start getting candidates' suggestions with ready references on their calendar to interview.

Over 120 companies have used Weekday for their hiring needs. These recruiters are attracted by the large pool of passive candidates (those who are not actively looking for a new role) who have been recommended by their peers. This helps to ensure that the quality of candidates is much superior to any job board-based platform. Moreover, with remote hiring on the rise, trust becomes even more important and so having references becomes critical to recruiters.

“While most other company functions like design, product, dev tools, and sales have seen breakthrough products in the last 5-6 years, recruitment of tech talent still hasn't. We are partnering with Weekday as they try to change that,” said Aviral Bhatnagar from Venture Highway, commenting on the funding.

Amit Singh, CEO and Co-founder of Weekday commented: “People check and rely on reviews nowadays for everything, be that going to a restaurant or buying anything on e-commerce. But, when it comes to making the important decision of hiring someone, they are happy to rely on a self-reported resume. This creates a detrimental cycle for both employers and the candidate. We want to change that. We want to solve the problem of lack of trust in the hiring process. We believe that a recruiting platform with “references” as the cornerstone is the solution that solves all hiring problems.”

Weekday is currently focused on companies hiring remote software engineers. Companies like Coinbase, Clipboard Health, AtoB, Daloopa, Zepto, and Round Finance, among others, have used Weekday for their hiring needs. A majority of the 120 companies that the startup has partnered with are headquartered in the US. Over 62,000 active job seekers and 800,000+ passive job seekers are registered in Weekday’s database, the majority of whom are based in India and Southeast Asia.

Headquartered in San Francisco, Weekday has a registered India office in Indiranagar, Bangalore. The Indian entity is called Dayworks Pvt Ltd with employees based in India.