Brand Intelligence Graph
Company Overview
About Karat
Karat is a Seattle, Washington-based technical interviewing platform — backed with $248 million in total funding including a $110 million Series C in April 2022 led by Salesforce Ventures and Serena Williams at a $1.1 billion valuation — providing enterprise technology companies and growth-stage startups with an outsourced technical interview service that deploys a global network of expert interview engineers (experienced software engineers who conduct interviews as a service) to conduct first-round technical interviews at scale, reducing time-to-hire and expanding diverse talent pipelines through standardized, bias-reduced interview methodology. Serving major tech companies, Karat acquired Triplebyte's adaptive assessment technology in March 2023, adding automated skills verification capabilities to its expert-led interview service.
Business Model & Competitive Advantage
Karat's interviewing cloud platform addresses the engineering capacity constraint that limits technical hiring throughput at fast-growing technology companies: companies hiring 100-500 engineers per year need their senior engineers to conduct first-round technical interviews — but asking senior engineers (earning $200,000-$400,000 annually) to spend 4-8 hours per week interviewing consumes expensive, high-value engineering time that could be spent on product development. Karat's model (trained interview engineers who specialize in conducting technical screens for Java, Python, JavaScript, data science, and system design) outsources the first-round interview to specialists — while Karat's proprietary scoring technology (normalized scoring that benchmarks candidate performance across all Karat-evaluated candidates) provides the comparative performance data that hiring managers use to make consistent, bias-reduced selection decisions. The rich candidate performance data (code output, problem-solving approach, communication quality across multiple technical domains) enables more nuanced hiring decisions than binary pass/fail assessments.
Competitive Landscape 2025–2026
In 2025, Karat competes in the technical interviewing, talent assessment, and HR technology market with HackerRank (technical assessment, $58M raised), Codility (technical interview platform, $22M raised), and CoderPad (live coding interviews, $30M raised) for enterprise engineering hiring organization technical interview outsourcing and assessment adoption. Salesforce Ventures' Series C leadership and Serena Williams' co-investment (Williams' VC arm focuses on diverse founder and workforce diversity investments) reflect both enterprise software market conviction and talent diversity thesis investment. The Triplebyte acquisition (March 2023) adds the automated skills credential technology that allows software engineers to pre-verify technical competency — creating a two-sided marketplace where pre-screened candidates can skip first-round interviews at Karat customer companies. The 2025 strategy focuses on growing enterprise contract value through the full-cycle interview service (expanding from first-round screening to full interview loop management), building the AI-assisted interview analysis for faster candidate evaluation, and expanding the candidate assessment platform to new technical domains.
Recent Activity
View all →Bangalore isn’t just India’s best market for software engineering talent. It’s one of the most important engineering hubs in the world. In Karat’s 2026 Top Cities for Engineering Talent report, it ranks #1 in India and #9 globally, with 27.3% of candidates performing in the top quartile worldwide. It also has the largest software engineering […] The post Bangalore Engineering Talent 2026: India’s #1 City for Software Engineers appeared first on Karat .
Material Event filed 2026-05-12
San Francisco and the larger Bay Area have long been the world’s most iconic engineering market. While many headlines over the last few years have reported on companies and tech workers leaving California for lower-cost markets like Texas, our data shows that San Francisco remains one of the world’s most concentrated and competitive markets for […] The post San Francisco Engineering Talent 2026: A Top 3 Global Hub for Software Engineers appeared first on Karat .
Material Event filed 2026-04-29
Quarterly Report filed 2026-04-29
What building and running the first human-led, AI-enabled technical interview system actually looks like When we launched Karat NextGen late last year, we had a clear thesis: the way companies evaluate engineering talent hadn’t kept pace with how software is actually built. AI tools had changed the job, but interviews were still designed for a […] The post How to Evaluate Engineers in the AI Era: Lessons from Six Months of AI-Enabled Technical Interviews appeared first on Karat .
Proxy Statement filed 2026-04-23
Toronto jumped nine spots in Karat’s 2026 ranking of the top cities for engineering talent to become the fifth city in the world for elite engineering talent, with 29.2% of candidates estimated to be in the top quartile globally. For years, Toronto has been on the rise as a tech hub. Now, it is North […] The post Toronto Engineering Talent 2026: Why It’s a Top 5 Global Tech Hub appeared first on Karat .
Seattle jumped up six spots to earn Karat's title of the world’s top city for elite talent in 2026, with 38.2% of candidates in the top quartile of global candidates. The post Why Seattle is the top city for software engineering talent in 2026 appeared first on Karat .
For the last two years, the narrative around software engineering talent was simple: talent was dispersing. Remote work, lower costs, and distributed teams were expected to flatten the global talent map. Companies (and top talent) were fleeing the coastal tech hubs in search of something different. Karat’s 2026 Top Cities data shows a different reality. […] The post Best U.S. cities for engineering talent in 2026 appeared first on Karat .
Artificial intelligence is reshaping not only how software is built, but how engineering excellence compounds into competitive advantage. Karat’s latest research shows that AI disproportionately amplifies the productivity and impact of top-performing engineers. Elite talent uses AI to accelerate development cycles, solve more complex technical challenges, and drive innovation at scale. As a result, performance […] The post Inside Karat’s 2026 Global Engineering Talent Rankings appeared first on Karat .
A Practical Guide for Training Interviewers in the Human + AI Era AI use in technical interviews can be detected by observing candidate behavior, coding patterns, and reasoning during live interviews. Common signals include continuous screen switching, instant fully formed solutions, inconsistent explanations, and pasted code blocks.The most reliable approach is training interviewers to evaluate […] The post How to Detect AI Use in Technical Interviews: A Guide for Engineering Leaders appeared first on Karat .
Key Differentiators
Strong Challenger
Karat is an established challenger with significant market presence and competitive offerings in HR Tech.
Growth Stage
Karat has achieved $110M in revenue, demonstrating strong product-market fit.
Frequently Asked Questions
Estimated Visibility Trend (Beta)
Simulated 8-week rolling score
Based on estimated brand signals. Historical tracking coming soon.
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