Brazil’s Rocketmat startup, provider of AI for HR management, receives US$1.5 million funding

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Matthew and August are not from here. They are not people, they are algorithms. But they work on commission and do their jobs so reliably that they have not gone unnoticed by Smart Money Ventures, Domo Invest and Alexia Ventures.

The three funds, which specialize in subscription software (SaaS) and artificial intelligence (AI) companies, decided to put a contribution of R$8 (US$1.5) million in the duo’s “cradle”: the Rocketmat, the AI for human resources management.

With the boost of this second investment round, the startup is ensuring another expansion cycle. Already proficient in four languages – Portuguese, English, French, and Spanish – Matthew and August will continue to learn new languages to serve companies like Ambev, Leroy Merlin, Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein, Cogna Educação, and iFood, among other brands already in Rocketmat’s playbook. New languages will be added to the work in just two days.

“Matthew is a kind of chief algorithm at Rocketmat. August is the sub-main algorithm responsible for tracking all the semantic fields of the local alphabet. This is the native alphabet of companies that rely on AI to find solutions for recruiting professionals,” jokes Tiago Machado, who founded the startup in 2017 with partners Paulo Nascimento and Pedro Lombardo.

Rocketmat, an international science company, was born in Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais) but is already established in the United States and Canada. In an interview with EXAME IN, Tiago Machado tells us that the headquarters of Rocketmat Inc. is in Dallas, Texas. The company has an office in Toronto, Canada. Its Brazilian subsidiary and Latin Americn headquarters, are in São Paulo, while its technology division is in Belo Horizonte.

Read also: “100 Startups To Watch 2021” in Latin America’s innovation powerhouse Brazil

The book of large corporations as clients was not exactly a choice of the three partners, but the result of opportunity with necessity.

“We work with large corporations because they have data. An AI can only predict the future with data from the past. And besides the fact that conglomerates have a lot of data at their disposal, they are constantly looking for technological evolution. So we are crossing an opportunity with a need. Technological progress is a necessity, and that became clear with the pandemic,” Machado reports.

CLIMBING TO DIVERSITY

Rocketmat, which has already routed the hiring of 2 million candidates for open positions, highlights the startup’s performance in 2020, when a solution was sought for Albert Einstein Hospital’s intake of 1,180 people. “In 36 hours, we helped set up the field hospital, and the episode confirmed that AI works very well when there is a sense of urgency.”

The startup’s performance meets two benchmarks: it helps with hiring and it helps management, because the algorithm can contribute information that leads to more assertive decision-making in training, accelerating careers, mitigating the risk of losing talent and in situations involving workplace health and safety.

Matthew can analyze, in real time, a variety of characteristics of current and former employees of an organization, as well as their performance metrics.

The algorithm, which does not classify people or receive information based on gender, age, ethnicity or sexual orientation, can determine if there were elements in a company’s past that led to discriminatory biases, even if they were unconscious.

“The algorithm puts all candidates on an equal footing,” says the executive, who has been unemployed before, not because it was good or bad, but because the hiring system didn’t give him the same opportunities offered to other candidates in a hiring process.

Rocketmat developed a technology architecture using Amazon Web Service (AWS) resources and became the first startup focused on Human Resources, an HRtech, to be certified by Amazon Advanced Partners.

The startup will use the investment round of R$8 million to expand its activities and democratize the use of artificial intelligence. Tiago Machado explains that the new funds should be focused on a research framework to provide more effective solutions to the market.

Source: exame

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