Triplebyte, The Technical Recruiting Platform From Former YC Partner Harj Taggar, Raises $3M

Triplebyte, a technical recruiting platform co-founded by former YC partner Harj Taggar, Ammon Bartram and Guillaume Luccisano, just raised $3 million from a long list of investors in the YC family.

Those backers include Initialized Capital (a fund originally started by Taggar, Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian), Ray Tonsing’s Caffeinated Capital, SV Angel, Felicis Ventures, Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Paul Buchheit, Trevor Blackwell, Geoff Ralston, Kevin Hale, Drew Houston, Greg Brockman, Elad Gil, Tikhon Bernstam, Eric Wu, David King, Michael Seibel, Emmett Shear, Justin Kan, Kyle Vogt, Robby Walker, Daniel Gross, Ilya Sukhar, Joe Greenstein, Bill Clerico, James Beshara, Jared Friedman and Jake Gibson.

Triplebyte is building a more automated way of sifting through engineering candidates for startups.

“If you talk to anybody based out here, the #1 thing they say its that it’s impossible to hire engineers,” Taggar said. “It’s the most talked about problem.”

Triplebyte has a multi-step process involving a blind screening and coding test that then moves to more thorough phone interviews. If candidates pass these first phases, Triplebyte will also fly potential hires out to West Coast and set them up with a gauntlet of in-person interviews with YC companies.

Taggar says that the company has refined the interviewing process to a point where they now want to scale it. They’ve also mapped out all the attributes that YC companies favor in technical hires, and they’re using that as a tuning filter. Taggar found that every startup has a slightly different idea of what it means to be a great engineer.

The company isn’t disclosing the number of hires it has placed so far, except to say that the company is profitable.

“We didn’t actually need the money in terms of survival,” he said. “We’re already placing enough people to profitable per month, and we’re not talking ‘Ramen profitable.’”