Seattle-based Karat, which helps companies conduct technical interviews, raises a $110M Series C at a $1.1B valuation led by Tiger Global
The news: Karat, a Seattle-based startup that helps companies conduct technical interviews, raised a $110 million Series C round at a $1.1 billion valuation.
Context & Ripple Effects
This round caps a fast climb for Karat: the company raised a $28M Series B in 2019 on its model of using engineers to interview, test, and evaluate candidates for clients like Citrix, Roblox, and InVision, and two years later it is a $1.1B company with $110M more in hand.
The round also fits a pattern at Tiger Global, which in the same period led SeekOut's $115M Series C at a $1B+ valuation and backed Seattle's Highspot at a $2.3B valuation — an aggressive COVID-era cadence that sources later described as fueling a unicorn bubble, with markdowns like DuckDuckGo (-72%) and Superhuman (-45%) arriving in 2023.
First-order effects
- Karat gains $110M and unicorn status to scale its interview-as-a-service model, deepening its position with engineering-heavy clients like Citrix, Roblox, and InVision.
- Tiger Global adds Karat to a Seattle portfolio streak — alongside SeekOut and Highspot — that it is building at a $1B+ valuation pace.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in technical-interview tooling face a capitalized leader: Karat's war chest set up its later move to acquire competitor Triplebyte, which had raised roughly $50M, consolidating the category.
- Tiger Global's willingness to lead $100M+ rounds for recruiting-adjacent startups raises the funding bar competitors must clear just to stay in the conversation.
Third-order effects
- If Tiger Global's 2021 cadence was inflating unicorn valuations, as later markdowns of DuckDuckGo and Superhuman suggest, Karat's $1.1B mark is the kind of paper valuation most exposed to repricing when the cycle turns.
- The pattern points toward consolidation of technical hiring into fewer, well-funded platforms — with interview infrastructure becoming a bought-and-sold category rather than a field of independents.
The trend: Tiger Global's 2021 blitz of $100M-plus rounds was minting billion-dollar valuations across Seattle's HR-tech cluster — marks that the 2023 wave of Tiger-led markdowns would later force the market to re-test.