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Indianapolis-based venture studio High Alpha on Wednesday announced the formal launch of its latest company, Pillar, which offers a platform that it says provides “more efficient, effective and equitable hiring practices.”
According to High Alpha, Pillar uses artificial intelligence and provides in-interview coaching to help companies assess a candidate’s fit for a job during the interview process.
The company has been operating in stealth mode for less than a year.
Pillar is led by CEO Mark Simpson, founder and former CEO at Acoustic, a leading marketing cloud that Simpson launched out of IBM in 2019.
Simpson previously founded and led Maxymiser, a customer service optimization platform, that was acquired by Oracle in 2015.
“People are the heart of every organization, but the hiring process is time-consuming, expensive, biased and deeply inefficient—and companies are suffering because of it,” Simpson said in written remarks. “We’re reimagining a process that’s been broken for decades by leveraging AI and automation to hire the best candidates with certainty, saving companies time and money from costly mis-hires and, ultimately, growing entire organizations in a way that’s efficient and equitable.”
Pillar’s hiring platform offers its users interview highlight clips and recordings, and integrations with major applicant tracking systems and platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google.
“We believe Pillar is a secret weapon for talent acquisition teams and companies that truly care about hiring the best people,” said Eric Tobias, partner at High Alpha.
Early customers of Pillar are video-hosting platform Wistia and technical talent marketplace Terminal. The companies say Pillar has helped boost their applicant-acceptance rate by one-third.
High Alpha has formally launched more than 25 companies and more than 30 overall since its founding in 2015 by tech entrepreneurs Tobias, Scott Dorsey, Mike Fitzgerald and Kristian Andersen.
Last week, High Alpha announced plans to launch its third venture studio after raising $18 million from repeat investors Emergence Capital of San Francisco and Foundry Group of Boulder, Colorado.
Through its three venture studios and three capital funds, High Alpha has raised more than $260 million. The funds invest in both High Alpha Studio companies and outside business-to-business SaaS companies.
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Hmmm…could this also be used to assess a politician’s fitness for office? There is a need for this especially if the artificial intelligence is more objective that the human intelligence has proven to be.