expertlead, a global community of highly qualified tech freelancers
By: Kevin Hart
Tags: Freelance, Startup, Freelancers, Community, Freelancing

expertlead has raised €7M in total. We talk with Arne Hosemann, its CEO.

PetaCrunch: How would you describe expertlead in a single tweet?

Arne Hosemann: expertlead is a global community of highly qualified tech freelancers. We support our community in all stages of self-employment: from project acquisition, providing relevant services and opportunities for further training and peer-to-peer learning, to administrative tasks.

PC: How did it all start and why?

AH: Earlier in our respective careers we constantly heard businesses complain about how hard finding great tech talent is. This, in itself, is not too surprising given top tech talent shortage is a widely discussed topic.

But when we talked to developers, they would point out how poor their experience with recruiters and staffing agencies had been. Very often even tech focused recruiters would not understand tech skills specifics or the professional preferences of these developers. This got us thinking about what it would take to make the experience on both sides significantly better.

As there is a growing trend towards self-employment in tech and freelancers still often work alone or in remote teams, we wanted to become their go-to partner that supports them in all stages of self-employment.

This was what drove our whole idea: building a community that is really different from a recruitment agency or a pure self-matching talent marketplace by becoming a true partner in our self-employed tech experts’ professional lives — from project acquisition, opportunities for continued professional development and peer-to-peer learning to taking care of administrative tasks.

Similarly, for our clients, we did not just want to focus on matching demand — our mission is to go a lot further and help companies identify the best talent. This is where many companies struggle, especially those that are not digital native. Assessing the various skills level of tech applicants is quite challenging and can be very time-consuming and hence expensive. Therefore, we started digging deeper into how we can test various tech stacks, databases and frameworks while still keeping it enjoyable for the applicants as well. Very quickly we got to the point where we realized that no single company can cover the entire tech field when it comes to testing — it is way too broad and complex. That is when the idea was born to involve our tech community in assessing other tech experts — which is one of our core USPs today.

With that in mind, we both left our previous job in 2017 and started expertlead in 2018.

PC: What have you achieved so far?

AH: Since Alex and I started in 2018 our team has grown rapidly: we are now an international startup headquartered in Berlin that employs around 45 people. By the end of year we expect to be around 60 employees.

We have invested most of our seed capital in building out our tech products. We aim to use tech solutions across our entire value chain: from identifying suitable tech freelancers, testing their skill level and matching them to client projects to providing relevant services to our freelance community. We have made significant progress to automate these different steps already, especially when it comes to assessing our community’s tech skills, automatically matching client projects with the best freelancers and identifying leading tech talent.

Our strong focus on tech allows us to help our clients faster and more effectively than others. With that approach we have already convinced leading European multinationals and tech companies including Daimler, Babbel and Delivery Hero.

Just recently we have announced one of our greatest achievements since our launch: having three global investors — Acton, Rocket Internet and SEEK — jointly invest €7M in our company for our Series A round.

PC: How will you use your recent funding round?

AH: The newly raised capital will be used to support our international growth ambitions as well as to further drive the automation of our products. We also wish to broaden our technical know-how so our platform can service new areas such as cybersecurity. Last but not least our team will also be focusing on expanding our community offering and peer-to-peer engagement.

PC: What do you plan to achieve in the next 2–3 years?

AH: Closing our Series A was a great success but only the beginning of an exciting journey! In the next 2–3 years we will fully focus on expanding our tech community and on building a leading tech company in a space that is still mainly dominated by quite “manual” agencies.

We want to be known in the tech ecosystem for being a truly valuable partner in highly skilled freelancers’ professional careers and for offering the most enjoyable and solid technical assessment experience through our platform. That is the way we intend to expand our community globally in the years to come.

On the client side, we want to continue in our path to becoming the go-to trusted partner for both multinational corporates and tech companies when it comes to identifying and hiring the leading tech talent for their most innovative and complex tech projects. This will also, of course, continue to benefit our community greatly.