Recruitment automation platform Kula has raised $12 million in a seed round led by Sequoia Capital India and Australia’s Square Peg Capital, the startup said on August 31.

Existing investors Venture Highway and Together Fund, as well as some existing angel investors, also participated in the round.

The company plans to use the funding to expand its R&D, product and go-to-market teams across three US, Singapore and India offices.

“With strong momentum from prominent Alpha clients, the funds will also accelerate their global client footprint,” the firm said.

Founded in 2021, Kula is a recruiting platform that helps companies and recruiters expand their talent pools by unifying all resources and automating outreach and engagement of top candidates.

Kula’s founding team includes co-founder Achuthanand Ravi, former Stripe, Uber, and Freshworks recruiter, Sathappan M, Freshworks engineer #3, who became Grab’s engineering lead, and Suman Kumar Dey Grab, an early member and architect of the Freshworks infrastructure team sales force.

The seed fundraising came six months after the pre-seed announcement, and the company raised about $2.7 million, bringing its total funding before the product’s public launch to $15 million.

Kula provides recruiters and founders with an intuitive software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to automate ongoing engagement with top candidates. It integrates seamlessly with all the tools of the recruiter interface, including LinkedIn, GitHub Gmail, and Applicant Tracking System (ATS), within the workday.

Recruiters can create automated workflows to interact with top candidates via email, LinkedIn feeds, and InMail. “Automated outreach can save recruiters from spending endless hours on the most repetitive tasks of the recruiting process,” the statement said.