BENGALURU: San Franciscobased Weekday, a sourcing engine on autopilot that drives seamless hiring through trusted references, on Thursday announced it has raised $2.2 million in a seed round led by Venture Highway with participation from several influential angel investors.

The Y-Combinator-backed start-up will be using the funds to bolster its current team thereby enabling more remote hiring. The funds will also be used to deepen Weekday’s footprint in the engineering market and its expansion into other domains.

In the months to come, the start-up plans to focus on onboarding more candidates while expanding the company partnerships. By 2025, the team expects to onboard over 250,000 active job seekers and around 2 million passive seekers, backed by peer references for recruiters from 1000+ companies.

A Weekday’s survey of over 200 companies’ hiring process indicates that while a majority did a basic background check on candidates (ie criminal record or whether they actually worked in their previous organisation), less than 5% of companies use reference checks from previous colleagues to make their hiring decisions.

Founded in 2021 by Amit Singh, Anubav Malik, and Chetan Dalal, Weekday is a sourcing engine that helps with the hiring of engineers vouched by their peers. Amit Singh, CEO-cofounder of Weekday said:

“People check and rely on reviews nowadays for everything, be that going to a restaurant or buying anything on e-commerce. We want to solve the problem of lack of trust in the hiring process.” The Indian entity is called Dayworks Pvt Ltd with employees based in India.