Crew (HX20) pulls in $2.3M to launch the first all-in-one recruiting CRM

Recruiting has evolved, it’s time for our tools to do the same. That’s exactly why Crew was created. Founded by Amine Skalli and later joined by Ruben Guenoun, Crew is the first all-in-one recruiting CRM designed for the modern way of recruiting. Today, they’re announcing their seed round of $2.3M with top angel operators as well as the release of their product.

A major shift: from inbound to outbound recruiting

In 2020, Amine and Mohamed came to us with a realization: recruiting has significantly changed. Candidates no longer apply for roles, companies have to go and seek them out. In a decade, we shifted from inbound to outbound recruiting. Now, companies need to go and look for candidates on a wide variety of channels, be it LinkedIn, GitHub, Twitter… Then, they need to nurture them. Yet, the tools at the disposal of recruiters haven’t adapted as quickly as this shift. While salespeople have CRMs such as Salesforce or Hubspot, recruiters are still left behind. We noticed this and wanted to provide talent teams with a tool to help them prepare for the future of work.

We usually come up with the business idea and an initial version of the product ourselves, but we have made exceptions. This was the case with Crew. In mid-2020, we decided to join forces to launch the recruiting tool for this paradigm shift. Together, we laid the groundwork for Crew and built a first version of the product based on this vision. Not only did we build the tool, we ate our own dog food and were one of Crew’s first users. We discarded our previous hiring tool and switched all of hiring processes to Crew. Recruiting is at the heart of everything we do at Hexa, behind the launch of any company is the creation of a team, and we’re instrumental is making that happen. Crew has made that job so much easier for us.

After leaving the studio, Crew continued their ascent to change the way hiring is done. They joined Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 batch to launch the very first version of the product, grew the team to 10 people, and partnered with 100 companies who helped beta test the product. 2022 was a good year for Crew as companies added more than 100,000 talents and hired 800 people on Crew!

Leading angel operators joining the round

Today, Crew is announcing their seed round of 2.3 million dollars from US and French seed-stage funds such as Rebel, Secret, and Kima. As well as a range of prominent angel operators who as well as capital, bring their wealth of expertise to the table. They include recruiting experts (Paul Forster co-founder of Indeed and Phillip Chambers former CEO & Co-founder Peakon, a Workday company), as well as experts in sales (Nicolas Marchais, VP Sales at Spendesk), product (Sam Edelson, ex Director of Product at Airbnb and Christian Reber co-founder of Pitch, Superlist), research & design (Behzod Sirjani of Slack & Reforge), and tech (Nick Caldwell ex VP Engineering at Twitter & Hubspot and Olivier Bonnet, CTO at BlaBlaCar).

After more than a year in closed beta, Crew is launching publicly today in self-serve mode. This makes it the first recruiting tool that allows users to start using the product immediately after signing up on the website

What’s next

Crew plans to accelerate its growth across Europe and in the US. The Crew team, fully-remote with a team split across all over France, is also planning to increase headcount.

We can’t wait to let you all know about Crew’s progress. We’re so excited for everything that lies ahead. The future of recruiting is bright.