Octopus Investments, part of Octopus Group, has today announced that its Development Capital team has provided £3.0 million of growth capital to Sova Assessment Limited, a HR Tech digital talent assessment software platform.
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 company’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 has over 80 enterprise-level customers and has assessed more than 1.5 million candidates across a number different sectors in over 20 countries. Customers include John Lewis Partnership, Santander, Natwest, National Australia Bank, Northern Trust, Generali, Police Now, Pfizer and Deloitte.
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 to further streamline recruitment whilst always enabling an accurate, unbiased and fair assessment of talent.
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.”
Alan Bourne, CEO of Sova Assessment Limited, added:
“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 in 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.”
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For journalists in their professional capacity only. The value of an investment, and any income from it, can fall as well as rise. Investors may not get back the full amount they invest. Personal opinions may change and should not be seen as advice or a recommendation. We do not offer investment or tax advice. We recommend investors seek professional advice before deciding to invest. Issued by Octopus Investments Limited, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Registered office: 33 Holborn, London, EC1N 2HT. Registered in England and Wales No. 03942880. Issued: November 2020.