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 →Enterprise leaders can scale technical interviews by standardizing evaluation criteria, modernizing assessments for the AI era, expanding interview availability, and adding trained interviewer capacity. This not only allows enterprises to conduct more interviews, but it also creates a consistent, high-quality hiring signal across teams, roles, regions, and talent sources without  stretching engineers thin. Scaling technical […] The post How Enterprise Leaders Can Scale Technical Interviews appeared first on Karat .
To assess engineering skills in financial services, organizations should define the competencies needed for each role, develop interview content that measures both foundational engineering and AI skills, evaluate candidates in realistic environments, and standardize their interviews and scoring. By taking these steps, you’ll be able to reliably identify software engineers who can build secure products […] The post How to Assess Engineering Skills in Financial Services appeared first on Karat .
Canadian banks should evaluate AI-ready contract engineers across four areas: engineering fundamentals, AI fluency, responsible AI judgment, and role-specific AI engineering skills. The strongest candidates can use AI productively, validate its output, protect sensitive data, identify security and model risks, and make sound decisions within a regulated banking environment. Banks should assess these capabilities through […] The post How Canadian Banks Should Evaluate AI-Ready Contract Engineers appeared first on Karat .
In every issue of The Talent Signal newsletter, Karat Co-Founder and President Jeffrey Spector explores the trends reshaping technical hiring. From changing skill requirements to new hiring challenges, the series helps engineering leaders understand how the broader landscape is changing software engineering and what it means for building high-performing teams. One of the biggest themes […] The post Hybrid AI Is a Talent Strategy, Not Just an Architecture Choice appeared first on Karat .
AI has impacted technical assessment formats in different ways. Code tests and take-home assessments now provide less reliable hiring signals. Because candidates can use AI to generate complete solutions, these asynchronous and output-based assessments offer less insight into a candidate’s true capabilities. Live interviews with a human hold up better, but they can’t measure how […] The post Technical Assessments in the Age of AI: Which Formats Still Work? appeared first on Karat .
Material Event filed 2026-07-29
Quarterly Report filed 2026-07-29
Not long ago, hiring software engineers was largely about evaluating whether someone could write quality code on their own. Today, that assumption no longer reflects how engineering work actually gets done. Generative AI has become part of the modern software development workflow. Engineers use AI to accelerate implementation, explore unfamiliar codebases, generate tests, debug issues, […] The post When AI Is a Baseline Skill, What Should Software Engineering Interviews Measure? 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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