HackerEarth, an Indian startup that grew from arranging hackathon to offering corporate innovation services, has closed a $4.5 million Series A funding round.
The Bangalore-based company said the funding was led by DHI Group, which operates U.S. IT recruitment portal Dice.com, with participation from Japanese quartet Beenext, Beenos, Digital Garage, BizReach and existing investor Prime Venture Partners.
The company was founded in 2013 and was in the inaugural batch at the GSF India accelerator program. Its initial service was Recruit, a service for vetting technical talent as part of the hiring process or internal company benchmarking. That service claims to have processed over one million applicants, and been used by the likes of Amazon for talent assessment purposes.
But HackerEarth was borne out of a desire to host hackathons and encourage participants and sponsors to get the most out of events. Last year, the company rekindled that focus on hacking when it introduced a second service — Sprint — which is targeted at corporate companies seeking fresh ideas or wanting a shot of innovation.
Sprint can be used…