Monday, 23 November 2020

London, UK: Sova Assessment Limited, the HR Tech digital talent assessment software platform, today announced it has raised £3 million of growth funding from Octopus Investments’ Development Capital team.

Based in London, with international offices in Dubai and Melbourne, Sova is an end-to-end candidate assessment and talent management SaaS platform. Its core customer base are large blue-chip organisations operating across a range of sectors who conduct large volumes of hiring or manage large numbers of applications with a need to digitise the experience creating efficiencies.

The funding is well timed to expand Sova’s reach and support to organisations, as businesses are currently facing increasing pressures arising from the global pandemic crisis, requiring faster and more cost-effective ways to tackle surging numbers of applicants, as well as longer-term talent solutions.

Sova’s offering, which combines psychometric science, and a compelling digital user experience, has been well positioned during COVID helping its customers to streamline and reduce the cost of pre and post hire talent assessment processes. Additionally, the platform improves the quality and accuracy of hiring decisions and helps eliminate hiring bias enabling organisations to meet their diversity objectives. Through a fully configurable assessment platform, Sova helps organisations make data-driven decisions that are fair, robust and explainable at every stage of the employee journey from recruitment, internal talent identification programmes, leadership development and beyond.

Sova will use the investment to further penetrate its core territories through an increase in sales, marketing and customer support as well as targeting growth in new geographies. Sova will also continue to invest in its market leading assessment platform, utilising automation and machine learning, which can help accelerate organisations’ digital transformation by further streamlining recruitment whilst always enabling an accurate, unbiased and fair assessment of talent.

Issues around bias have long blighted the recruitment process. Increased pressures presented by the pandemic risk further amplifying these challenges as stretched recruiters revert to blunt hiring measures that endanger diversity and inclusion. This has a detrimental impact on individuals, society and the organisation’s bottom line.

However, cost efficiencies and diversity need not be mutually exclusive. With many organisations having been forced to pivot towards more flexible, and often home based, working, organisations are now primed for an evolution in the scale of talent pools potentially available to them, with Sova’s assessment solutions perfectly positioned to help identify talent quicker and without prejudice.

Alan Bourne, CEO of Sova Assessment Limited, said:
“From the outset, we built a single, unified platform to provide fairer, more efficient and engaging assessment solutions, that put an end to the fragmented and outdated approach offered by the traditional assessment market. Our solution provides a seamless user experience and end-to-end talent analytics, overcoming the barriers often seen in other products that have been built by acquisition of multiple platforms rather than design. This investment marks an important and exciting milestone in our journey, which allows us to accelerate the development of our platform applying ethical and transparent machine learning to optimise fairness and streamline pre and post hire assessment. We look forward to working with Octopus during this next chapter, which will see us able to offer superior services, with even stronger outcomes for our clients, which is great news for industry and candidates alike.”

Richard Court, Head of Development Capital at Octopus Investments, said:
“The traditional methods for recruitment have fundamentally changed in recent years and have been accelerated by the ongoing pandemic. Sova’s platform is extremely well positioned to help companies rapidly adjust their approach to hiring in a virtual working environment. Alan and his team have an impressive track record with deep industry experience and expertise to develop the right product for businesses to deliver this change. There is also a strong values alignment with Octopus, and we are excited to be supporting Sova in its commitment to help customers build fairer, more robust talent assessment processes from a diversity and inclusion standpoint”.

Sova has over 80 enterprise-level customers and has assessed >1.5m candidates across a number of different sectors in over 20 countries. Customers include John Lewis Partnership, Santander, Natwest, National Australia Bank, Northern Trust, Generali, Police Now, Pfizer and Deloitte.

-Ends-
Note to editors:

Media contacts

Sova Assessment
Claire Rahmatallah
claire.rahmatallah@sovaassessment.com

Octopus Investments
Sam Ferris
press@octopusgroup.com
020 3142 4933


About Sova Assessment
Sova Assessment launched in 2015 as one of the first fully configurable, mobile friendly digital assessment platform centred around client needs. It has since grown to a point where it is now used by over 80 organisations that rely on Sova’s SaaS-based platform which provides an end to end talent assessment solution, combining psychometric science with a compelling technology platform. Sova serves customers in over 20 countries, with offices in London, Dubai and Melbourne.

About the Development Capital team, part of Octopus Investments
The Development Capital team, part of Octopus Investments, provides growth capital to some of the UK’s most exciting B2B software companies. We are passionate about working with brilliant management teams and helping scale-up businesses continue their growth trajectory. Our typical initial investment is between £2-10m and we always look to be the capital provider of choice for our strong performing portfolio companies. Depending on the stage of the company and management team objectives, we can provide flexible capital tailored to each scenario.

About Octopus Group
Octopus is a group of innovative, entrepreneurial businesses investing in the people, ideas and industries that will help to change the world. We are experts in financial services and energy, and we care as much about the impact of our investments as the returns they generate. Today we manage more than £9.1* billion on behalf of retail and institutional investors. Our energy supply business is one of the fastest growing companies in the UK, reaching 1.7 million customers in just four years, and is the only supplier to be recommended by Which? three years in a row.

Octopus Energy, Octopus Investments, Octopus Renewables, Octopus Real Estate, Octopus Ventures, Octopus Wealth and Seccl Technology are all part of Octopus Group. Visit octopusgroup.com.

*Includes funds under advisory mandates and the Octopus Cash service as at 30th September 2020.