Karat, which uses engineers to interview, test, and evaluate other engineers for jobs with clients like Citrix, Roblox, and InVision, raises $28M Series B
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2019 round slots into a clear arc: a year earlier, Triplebyte raised its own $10M Series A to assess and match engineers with online tools, making technical evaluation a contested, venture-funded category with two distinct approaches — human interviewers versus software screening.
The $28M Series B is what let Karat scale its engineer-led model toward enterprise clients like Citrix, Roblox, and InVision; by 2021 it had converted that traction into a $110M Series C at a $1.1B valuation, and in 2023 it closed the loop by moving to acquire Triplebyte outright.
First-order effects
- Clients such as Citrix, Roblox, and InVision gain outsourced interviewing capacity, shifting their engineering managers' time from running first-round screens to final decisions.
- The new capital funds expansion of Karat's paid interviewer network — engineers evaluating engineers as a service, rather than a tool.
Second-order effects
- Triplebyte's software-based assessment approach now competes head-to-head with a better-capitalized human-interview rival, pressuring it on methodology and pricing until Karat ultimately moves to buy it in 2023.
- Adjacent developer-tooling vendors like Cortex, selling internal portals to engineering orgs, face buyers whose interview pipelines are increasingly handled externally — reshaping where engineering-leadership budgets go.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, technical interviewing consolidates from a set of competing venture-backed startups into a single scaled platform, giving whoever owns the interviewer network structural leverage over how engineering candidates are assessed industry-wide.
- Hiring evaluation becomes an outsourced service layer between candidates and employers, standardizing what 'passing an interview' means across client companies.
The trend: Technical-interview outsourcing is consolidating from rival venture-backed approaches — human interviewer networks versus automated assessment tools — into a single dominant platform.