The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures and joined by Cervin Ventures, Gradient Ventures (Google's AI fund), and Randstad Innovation Fund. Indy Guha, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, is joining AllyO's board.

"Businesses are finding that traditional recruiting means are insufficient to keep today's candidates engaged," said Guha. "But key breakthroughs in natural language processing and conversational AI, together with the ubiquity of smartphones, can transform how businesses conduct recruiting. AllyO's AI-first approach is perfectly positioned to lead the way. AllyO has already demonstrated tremendous market success by helping Fortune 500 companies achieve dramatic improvements in core recruiting metrics."

Sahil Sahni, co-founder of AllyO said, "AllyO's AI recruiter, Ally, is used by more than 50 large enterprises across 10 industries and is available in multiple languages and countries. Ourcustomers have seen application completion rates increase to 91 percent, time-to-hire reduce by 83 percent and "strongly positive" feedback from applicants rise to 81 percent. During this time, Ally has processed millions of applicant interactions and scheduled hundreds of thousands of interviews, each of which have contributed to making Ally smarter for new and existing customers alike."

The new financing round will allow AllyO to continue expand Ally's AI capabilities. It will be used to further enhance the candidate and hiring team experience, strengthen the recruiting automation workflow, and deepen the underlying artificial intelligence. To do this, AllyO plans to more than double its headcount across both business and product teams within 2018 and open its second office.

"We had a bold vision to build a single point of contact for all applicants and hiring managers, at an enterprise scale. We wanted to automate all cumbersome recruiting tasks and make them intuitive. Ally achieves this with a purpose-built, highly customizable, deep-workflow, conversational AI that integrates well with existing enterprise systems." said Ankit Somani, co-founder of AllyO.

"The recruiting industry has a lot to benefit from increased use of automation and artificial intelligence, and AllyO offers one of the most comprehensive platforms that we've seen, transforming the recruiting workflow from sourcing to post-hire," said Paul Jacquin, Managing Partner at Randstad Innovation Fund. "We're thrilled to add AllyO to our portfolio. It was an easy decision to buy into AllyO's mission to create an enhanced candidate experience and improve the modern recruiter's productivity."

AllyO was co-founded by Ankit Somani and Sahil Sahni, who have known each other for over 15 years. Prior to founding AllyO, they worked at Google and McKinsey & Co., respectively. The current team largely consists of experienced professionals from brands like Google, Oracle, Netapp, McKinsey and IBM. The team prides itself on an open and disruptive culture, and is working together to reinvent the traditional recruiting, which has seen no breakthrough innovations since online job boards.

About AllyO
AllyO is one of the fastest growing HR Tech startups and artificial intelligence companies in Silicon Valley. It was founded in 2016 by Google and MIT engineers with a simple mission - use technology to make recruiting experience simple and efficient. AllyO has worked with the leading Fortune 500 companies to build a highly customizable AI recruiter that utilizes natural language processing and machine learning to automate and self-optimize the end-to-end recruiting workflow. It addresses the traditional inefficiencies of lost applicants and low conversions due to poor candidate experience, and high cost of recruiting due to overburdening of administrative tasks on the hiring teams.

AllyO is backed by leading investors such as Bain Capital Ventures, Randstad Innovation Fund, Gradient Ventures (Google's AI fund), and Cervin Ventures.