Manchester-based Arctic Shores provides psychometric assessments for employers, harnessing neuroscience, AI, and gamification to bring greater diversity and quality to recruitment practices.
The startup has now secured €5 million in Series A investment to accelerate its international expansion. Beringea led the round, with participation from existing shareholders including Candy Ventures.
Arctic Shores’ develops online and app-based gamified psychometric tests for recruitment. Its tests use behavioural tasks and micro-shifts in responses to determine personality traits – including appetite for risk and problem-solving ability – breaking free from the traditional question-based approach. Collecting 7,000 data points, the platform is able to identify which candidates are most suited to a role in a company.
This data-driven and objective approach has been shown to increase diversity by as much as 60%, improve the quality of hires by up to 40%, and raise positive candidate feedback to over 80%.
Since it was founded in 2014, Arctic Shores has helped over 140 organisations across 40 different countries to predict better hires from over 500,000 candidates. The business is rapidly expanding internationally, making up 48% of its revenue in this financial year. Its offices in Manchester, London, and Singapore support a fast-growing roster of global clients, including PwC, Airbus, Siemens, and Deutsche Telekom.
Arctic Shores will use the investment to accelerate the expansion of its international offices and launch an SaaS platform to broaden its product offering to support both enterprise clients and SMEs. The round brings the total amount raised by the startup to €9.1 million.
“Arctic Shores has a clear mission to enable companies to be more objective and broader in their selection of applicants and foster an assessment process that provides a fairer evaluation of people from different backgrounds and socio-economic groups,” said Dr. Safe Hammad, CTO and co-founder of Arctic Shores.
“Our rapid growth in the UK and internationally has demonstrated the vast demand for a step change in the way millions of people are selected for roles. Beringea will provide vital support and expertise in scaling international software companies to help us realize our vision.”
Among Arctic Shores’ clients are Siemens UK, which recently won HR Magazine’s Most Effective Recruitment Strategy Award, and the Intellectual Property Office, which has been shortlisted for the CIPD Award for Best Diversity and Inclusion Initiative.
“Safe, Robert and the exceptional team at Arctic Shores have built an international success story from the heart of Manchester, demonstrating the pressing need for a new approach to recruitment processes that fosters greater diversity and better hires for organisations around the world,” said Marc Shirman, Investment Director and Head of the Manchester office of Beringea.
“Beringea has backed the vision and innovation of one of the North of England’s leading technology companies, inspired by a pioneering approach to combining neuroscience, data analytics and game technologies. This investment will play a vital role in bringing this pioneering platform to millions of applicants worldwide.”
