Global investment crowdfunding platform OurCrowd has published its Jobs Index, a report that the company plans to publish quarterly, that indicates startups are increasing hiring despite the ongoing pandemic challenges.
According to OurCrowd, high-tech startups with job openings in Israel have risen by 400% in the past six months with software engineers in the most demand.
The OurCrowd Jobs Index reports that OurCrowd-backed high-tech startups are seeking to fill hundreds of job openings despite record-high unemployment in the overall economy.
The number of jobs listed by OurCrowd’s global portfolio companies more than doubled from 350 in June 2020 to 912 in December 2020.
Laly David, OurCrowd Partner and Head of Business Development, said they are thrilled to see the job creation taking place within their portfolio companies.
“Despite the lingering pandemic and fears that the economy would take a long time to recover, many of the startups backed by OurCrowd are already emerging strongly from the downturn.”
OurCrowd predicts that job growth will continue through 2021 with a mix of in-person and remote job openings.
“We will be expanding our global team further in 2021,” said Howard Edelstein, CEO of BioCatch, a behavioral biometrics company providing fraud prevention solutions to financial services, whose job ads received more clicks than any other OurCrowd portfolio company in the fourth quarter of 2020. “With almost 200 employees on board we are hiring across all departments and hope to grow to 250 employees by the end of this year.”
While demand for software engineers has grown the fastest, the demand has also increased to a lesser extent in most other areas as well. About one-third of the surveyed companies said they have hired more aggressively during the pandemic than before the COVID-19 closures. Approximately 23% of surveyed companies said they had hired at a slower pace since the start of the pandemic.
Dvir Cohen, CEO of Memic Innovative Surgery Ltd, says his company will continue the process of expanding its commercial team in the US, adding new employees in all segments.
“Memic will enhance its research and operational capabilities to expand targeted applications and surgical disciplines, adding software developers, artificial intelligence experts, project managers and mechanical and systems engineers.”
Even as COVID-19 vaccines are being rolled out in Israel and elsewhere, only a small fraction, 14.3%, of surveyed portfolio companies, expect all their employees will be back in the workplace by July 1, 2021, with 85.7%, expect a mix of in-person and remote work.
The report states that 52.5% of surveyed startups expect “cautious hiring” through 2021. Meanwhile, 47.6% said they plan “aggressive hiring” through 2021.
OurCrowd is one of the largest online capital formation platforms in the world providing growth capital to early-stage ventures. The OurCrowd report highlights the vital need for policymakers to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation as smaller firms tend to generate the bulk of new jobs thus growing the economy.
OurCrowd said it intends on publishing the Jobs Index report quarterly. The Q4 Jobs Index is available here.
