London-based startup Huzzle has raised €1.67 million in pre-seed funding to transform the early careers space. Backing the young company is 10X Founders, alongside several angel investors, including Verena Pausder (Chairwoman of the German Startup Association), Leon Szeli (Founder of Presize, Acquired by Meta), Peter Bosch (ex Board Member at Bentley), and Alexander Mrozek (ex Global Product Lead at Google).
Founded in 2021, Huzzle is building a three-sided marketplace that connects students, societies, and employers. Starting as a CRM for student organisations, it has grown into a career companion used by more than 80,000 students, generating over 1,000 job applications and event registrations per day.
Robert Wuttke, Founding Partner and Managing Director of 10x Founders, said: “I believe that the next generation of students will use Huzzle to enter the job market, because it brings clarity & convenience to a space that has been fragmented and underserved.”
The idea of better job search experience for students is central to Huzzle’s mission with CEO Ingmar Klein declaring that “students deserve better.” “Landing a graduate job is a gruelling process, a cycle of long and tiring applications met with rejection after rejection. It’s no surprise that by the end of this, students accept any role that comes their way. The result, a horde of unhappy, unproductive, and frankly burned out young professionals,” he added.
To solve this, Huzzle is reinventing student job search with a two-step approach. First, similar to Netflix’s recommendation system, Huzzle helps students find the right roles by matching them with entry-level opportunities based on their interests and goals. “With a database of 20,000+ entry-level opportunities, everyone can find the right job on Huzzle,” Klein assured.
The second step is improving the application process, which Huzzle does in two ways. Firstly, with its auto-apply chrome extension, students on Huzzle spend 87% less time submitting applications. Moreover, Huzzle helps students submit higher-quality applications, allowing them to use AI to personalise their CV for every role they apply to and connecting them with mentors.
This comprehensive approach is central to the brand’s identity. Seeing themselves as a career companion versus just a job platform, Klein says Huzzle’s mission is “to support students throughout their university journey, with the end goal of helping them secure their dream graduate role”.
Beyond jobs and internships, Huzzle users can also discover student societies, something the company says sets them apart from their competitors. More than just a competitive play however, this focus on student societies stems from Co-Founders Ingmar Klein (CEO) and Parham Rakshanfar’s (COO) own experiences. Before founding Huzzle, Klein joined the PE & VC Club at the University of St Gallen, while Rakshanfar was managing UCL Entrepreneurs’ corporate relations. The pair saw societies as a crucial part of student life, a feeling supported by empirical research, which has found that society involvement makes students 18% more career-ready.
Huzzle integrates student societies into the platform through a first-of-its-kind CRM, allowing society leaders to create events, collaborate with other societies, manage sponsorships, and much more. More than 600 societies across the UK & Ireland are now using Huzzle, which has helped the company attract interest in Mainland Europe from societies at Bocconi University and the Technical University of Munich, as well as the U.S., including Browns Consulting Group. Huzzle is looking to use its recent fundraising to capitalise on this opportunity and expand to new regions within the U.S. and Europe in 2024 to become the go-to-platform for all student societies.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2024/04/london-based-huzzle-secures-e1-67-million-pre-seed-to-help-students-land-their-dream-graduate-job/
