OpenView Venture Partners backs software firm SmashFly Technologies with $9M

OpenView Venture Partners, a Boston-based venture capital firm that invests in software-as-a-service companies, has backed Concord-based SmashFly Technologies with $9 million.
The Series A equity investment will allow SmashFly to bolster its research and development team and its sales and marketing efforts.

Ricky Pelletier, vice president at OpenView Venture Partners, who helped lead the investment, said the expertise of the executive team at SmashFly and the company’s unique recruitment software was attractive to the firm.

“The way that talent acquisition is done is changing pretty dramatically, and the way systems and technology is used to enable talent management is also changing,” he said in an interview.

Many companies continue to rely on recruiting systems to manage the hiring process after the job-seeker has already applied, while using separate systems for candidate recruitment and engagement. That proves to be complex, costly and inefficient, according to OpenView. Instead, SmashFly’s software offering helps companies find, engage, and recruit top-tier talent, according to OpenView.

SmashFly offers an all-in-one-place “total recruitment marketing” software with recruitment analytics to companies with more than 1,000 employees. That helps companies save time and money and improve their talent acquisition process, according to OpenView.

About 40 percent of the $9 million investment is going into research and development efforts, while the remaining 60 percent will be used for sales and marketing initiatives and customer acquisition, said SmashFly founder and CEO Michael Hennessy.

“Since we haven’t taken any money to date, it’s been all about growing organically and by word of mouth, and part of this (investment) means we need to get out there, get the word out to dominate the market the way we want to,” he said in an interview.

The company currently has about 20 employees with nine in Concord and the rest working remotely. Plans for this year include expanding headcount to 45, including new hires at the Concord headquarters, Hennessy said.

The company’s paying customers include McGraw-Hill, The Cheesecake Factory and Bright House Networks, Hennessy said.

Hennessy said the company is profitable and has grown year-over-year sales significantly, though he wouldn’t disclose revenue specifics.

The company’s competitors include San Francisco-based Findly— but Hennessy said there is a key distinction between SmashFly and its competitors.

“We’re the only company that’s built a recruitment marketing platform for the ground up,” he said. “Ours also offers far better analytics.”

OpenView’s portfolio, which is comprised of expansion-stage, software-as-a-service companies, includes Chelmsford-based cloud backup and disaster recovery firm Intronis, Dedham-based data archiving services firm Sonian and the newly-announced FieldLens, a mobile tech firm for construction workers based in New York.