Remote jobs network Torre lands $5m seed

Silicon Valley-based Torre, a professional network for remote job seekers and recruiters, has secured $5 million in seed funding. The investors included MatterScale Ventures and Amazon and Apple former Vice President Diego Piacentini.

PRESS RELEASE

San Francisco, August 11, 2020] – Torre, a new professional network for remote job seekers and recruiters, has oversubscribed its $5 million seed funding investment round. With more than 7,000 openings per month, Torre has positioned itself as the largest platform that compiles remote full-time jobs and gained substantial momentum since its 2018 inception.

The round’s investment stack consists of venture capital funds, angel investors including Uber’s former global head of product operations Mike Shoemaker, Amazon and Apple former vice president Diego Piacentini, Instagram engineering chief Rodrigo Schmidt, and MatterScale Ventures, to name a few.

Torre now has a total of $10 million of capital invested in its operations after $1 million was contributed by founder and CEO Alexander Torrenegra, who is a serial entrepreneur and investor on Shark Tank Latin America, and another $4 million was previously invested by Emma Group Holdings.

The nextgen professional network uses machine learning algorithms and intelligent programmatic recruiting to enable the most optimal pairing of remote candidates and companies.

This is done by helping job seekers build a “professional genome” based upon hard and soft skills, interests, aspirations, learning preferences, and verifiable peer recommendations. Torre then uses that job seeker’s genome to help them find better, more rewarding jobs (and to help companies find the best talent).

Torre now boasts more than 1.5 million job seeker profiles, a base of 500,000 active monthly users, and a monthly average of 22,000 job seeker applications.

Evan Deutsch, Torre investor and member of TBD Angels, says: “Today, our world of work is almost unrecognizable. Historical unemployment rates, a sudden normalization of remote work, and the explosion of the ‘liquid’ job market have rendered existing professional networks outdated. The market opportunity is crystal clear, and Torre has arrived at a well-timed, well-built, and well-led solution.”

The difference between Torre and the thousands of portals that present job positions from around the world, including dominant incumbents like LinkedIn and Indeed, is that Torre is specifically designed and optimized for remote employment. At Torre, they estimate that 3 out of 4 people are interested in being employed in a remote job.

Some of the main benefits of remote work include access to talent (for companies) and opportunities (for people), the diversity of talent and being able to work with people from different backgrounds, better integration of life and work, and costs (reduction for companies and better income for workers).

In fact, in itself, Torre is a company with the ‘remote-first’ principle that CEO Alexander Torrenegra applies to all the companies he has founded, allowing the 28 people on the team to be spread across different time zones, passing through the United States, Colombia, Nigeria, the Netherlands, and Australia.

Torre will use the new seed investment funds to get closer to achieving its mission of leveraging digital connections to make work more fulfilling for people around the world, regardless of their location, nationality, gender, or socioeconomic background.

Andrés Cajiao, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer at Torre, says: “We’re working to build new functionalities that are natively viral and highly engaging, such as networking. We are also further expanding into part-time and flexible remote work and adding radical transparency to our algorithms with the goal of making biases more evident and foster more inclusion and diversity.”

Part of this transparency will include the ability to explain to those who were not chosen for a job why they were not chosen, with the automatic comparison of gaps between their genome and the selected person as well as recommendations on how to close those gaps, according to Cajiao.

The trend of remote jobs has been growing considerably in recent years, leveraged by technological advances in the digital ecosystem, and the current global COVID-19 pandemic and rapid transition to remote work has acted as a meteoric catalyst for the trend.

CEO Alexander Torrenegra says: “Now that companies like Twitter are announcing that there will be remote employment positions forever, there has been a cascade effect, due to the change in the rules of the game. Issues such as not having to depend on work visas, allow you to search for the best talent in the world no matter where you are. Torre’s true performance is about to begin.”

For more information, to build your professional genome, or to post a remote job opening on Torre, visit www.torre.co.

About Torre
Based in Silicon Valley, Torre is a professional network for remote and flexible work. With more than 7,000 openings per month, Torre has positioned itself as the largest platform that compiles remote full-time jobs. Founded by Colombian-American entrepreneur and investor Alexander Torrenegra in 2017, the nextgen remote work staffing and recruiting platform now boasts more than 1.5 million job seeker profiles, a base of 500,000 active monthly users, and a monthly average of 22,000 job seeker applications. For more info, visit www.torre.co.