HR automation software startup Sora announced this morning that it closed a $14 million Series A round of funding. Two Sigma Ventures led the financing event, putting in $10 million, with prior investors completing the round.

The round comes after Sora raised a $5.3 million seed round in July 2020. First Round and Elad Gil led that investment.

TechCrunch caught up with Sora CEO Laura Del Beccaro to chat about the round. We were curious about why this was the right moment for the company to raise more capital — the startup noted last year that it had around 2.5 years of runway — and what it intends to do with the money.

Regarding the first question, Del Beccaro said that her company raised its seed round to validate its market after finding early traction with its product. The CEO added that her company found better problem validation — product-market fit, essentially — than it had anticipated in the following quarters, and that after a year of scaling “thoughtfully” is now ready to accelerate its growth in both financial and human terms.

Sora reached an inflection point, she said, sometime in the first half of 2020. The early COVID days, in other words. The pandemic was tough on HR teams, Del Beccaro explained: With employees going remote, and a shift to hiring over Zoom, you can imagine why HR teams were having a time and a half during the rapid shakeups of the labor market.

The startup’s growth accelerated (Read more...)