Glassdoor today announced a $40 million investment round as the Bay Area-based company looks to grow its recruiting and jobs platform.
Glassdoor raised the fresh cash from T. Rowe Price, along with existing investors including Battery Ventures, Google Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures and Tiger Global. Total funding to date is now $200 million. TechCrunch pegged Glassdoor’s valuation at $1 billion.
Founded in 2007 by Expedia and Zillow co-founder Rich Barton, along with his former Expedia colleague Robert Hohman, Glassdoor originally built a platform for employees to share information and post reviews about their jobs, salaries, and workplace environment. The company became known for its numerical ranking of CEOs; today, it has data on more than 540,000 companies in 190 countries.
But Glassdoor has also grown into one of the largest career sites in the world. It has job listings that, when paired with the wealth of data on companies — pay data; interview reviews; office photos; etc. — and individual leaders, makes for a valuable combination.
Glassdoor earns revenue from employers who pay to leverage premium features of the platform to connect with job candidates. Around 40 percent of companies in the Fortune 500 are Glassdoor customers.
“We believe that Glassdoor is fundamentally changing the way job seekers search for jobs and companies recruit talent,” Henry Ellenbogen, portfolio manager of T. Rowe Price New Horizons Fund, Inc., said in a statement.
Creating a massive recruiting company was actually always the goal for Glassdoor. Speaking at a Zillow event in 2014, Barton explained the backstory of Glassdoor’s creation and noted its grand vision.
“Our BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) for Glassdoor is to become the largest recruiting company in the world, to help everyone find a job and company they love, to become ‘TripAdvisor for employment,'” he said in 2014. ” … This is a revolution in the jobs industry. One day we will become the most important company, the most important marketplace, in recruiting.”
Glassdoor now counts 30 million monthly unique users. The company, which employs 600 people across five offices around the world, has localized websites and mobile apps in 12 countries.
