D.C.-based
Interfolio, the SaaS platform for hiring in higher education, is raising a $5m Series B round. The company, founded in 1999 by Steve Goldenberg, is also looking to add at least three to its current team of 34, including a director of marketing with SaaS technology experience. The new positions are only the tip of the iceberg; Goldenberg has plans to double the number of Interfolio employees in the coming year.
"We have 34 right now," Goldenberg explains. "Once we raise our funding, we should double that in the next 12 months."
Despite the plans to double the staff, the Series B round isn't Interfolio's main concern right now. Goldenberg explains: "We've been building our sales pipeline." Spring and early summer are the best times to get new clients, and Interfolio wants to add to its 300+ institutional client list.
More than 200,000 scholars use Interfolio to manage their careers. The platform, as it was built in 1999, has helped those in higher education create dossiers for graduate-school applications and university positions. In 2013, Interfolio launched a new service called ByCommittee. It is not a pivot, Goldenberg says, but an additional product designed to help busy professionals in higher education gain more time for teaching and research by streamlining the time committee work takes.
"We learned so much about the life cycle of a scholar [while working at Interfolio]," Goldenberg says, "from grad school to chairing committees." In other words, once academics reach a certain level in their careers, they are expected to sit on committees, which can take valuable time.
ByCommittee helps committees focused on hiring and tenure decisions by managing paperwork online. Committees can track applicants, read PDFs of their dossiers, comment, and rank and communicate with applicants and with one another.
ByCommittee is being sold to universities via annual license; nearly 300 are already using the platform to manage their hiring and tenure processes. Goldenberg says that as ByCommittee sales increase, the fees for individual Interfolio users will go down and will eventually go away. (Interfolio users pay a small annual subscription fee and pay to have paper copies of their dossier sent when they apply for positions.)
"A Ph. D doesn't have the money," Goldenberg says. "We don't charge them because we want to. The more institutions that adopt ByCommittee, the less it will cost scholars to apply for professional opportunities."