This article is a part of Poland Unpacked. Weekly intelligence for decision-makers
Talent Bridge, the creator of a platform combining psychometrics, AI and analytics, has brought 24Ventures on board as an investor. The company wants to move beyond recruitment and develop tools to support employee development and talent management.
Talent Bridge has joined the portfolio of 24Ventures, a fund that invests in early-stage technology companies. Although the company built by Piotr and Monika Marciniak has been operating for several years, its profile and direction for further growth fit the fund’s strategy.
From a business venture to a technology company
Talent Bridge has operated as a company since 2019, but its origins go back to Piotr Marciniak’s earlier business activities, which he pursued alongside other professional commitments. Over that time, the company went through several pivots.
It is now developing a Human Decision Intelligence Platform – a suite of tools combining psychometrics, artificial intelligence, analytics and automation. Initially, the company’s solutions focused on assessing the competencies of candidates and employees. Talent Bridge now wants to apply them across subsequent stages of the talent journey as well, including onboarding, career-path planning and skills development.
Around 100 Active Clients
According to Piotr Marciniak, co-founder and CEO of Talent Bridge, the company currently has around 100 active clients. Its solutions have been used by companies including KPMG, Asseco, Żabka Polska, ING, Ergo Hestia and Grupa Pracuj.
Psychometrics in recruitment
The company’s solutions are built around psychometrics, which it uses, among other things, to assess the competencies of candidates and employees.
“Put simply, psychometric tools include personality questionnaires and competency tests. The person being assessed receives a link to an online test – for example, one measuring numerical reasoning – reads the instructions and answers a set of questions randomly selected by the system.
“Once the test is completed, the person receives automated feedback. The recruiter, meanwhile, gets a report showing the level of a given competency compared with people with a similar profile who have previously taken the test. It is an additional source of information that can help the recruiter make a more informed decision,” Piotr Marciniak explains.
The company measures the effectiveness of its tools
According to Piotr Marciniak, a large IT company uses Talent Bridge’s test when recruiting software developers and then examines whether the test results are linked to employee retention after the first three months.
“We see a significant correlation of 95% here,” says Piotr Marciniak.
According to Talent Bridge’s CEO, the tools can also be used to reduce employee turnover. He says analyses conducted jointly with clients indicate that their use can lower turnover by 4 percentage points.
Growth funded from its own resources
So far, Talent Bridge has grown using its own money as well as grant funding.
“Of course, every lesson and every failure hurts twice as much when you are financing it yourself. On the other hand, it gave us an enormous focus on the customer – on acquiring and retaining them. Otherwise, we would have been out of the market,” says Piotr Marciniak.
The company’s annual revenue does not exceed PLN 2 million (about EUR 470,000).
Capital to accelerate growth
The decision to partner with 24Ventures was driven by a desire to accelerate the business and develop new tools.
“We would have achieved the targets we set ourselves on our own, I am convinced of that, but not with the same momentum or speed as we can with a fund. That is why we decided to give up part of our equity in exchange for capital. We live in a time of rapid change, so we have to adapt and introduce new and better solutions,” says Piotr Marciniak.
Expert's perspective
The end of HR tech as we know it? The work tech era is coming
AI and the growing popularity of so-called vibe coding are dramatically lowering the barrier to building a competing solution. In a world where software itself is becoming increasingly easy and inexpensive to build, value is shifting toward what is harder to replicate: data, integration with customers’ processes, know-how, trust and established ecosystems. Benefits platforms are a good example. Worksmile, part of the Pracuj Ventures portfolio, derives its competitive advantage not only from its technology but also from an extensive network of partners and providers that would be difficult to replicate quickly.
I also expect further consolidation in the market. Simple point solutions that address a single customer problem may lose ground to platforms covering a larger part of the so-called employee life cycle. There will still be room, however, for specialized products that solve a specific, difficult problem significantly better than larger platforms can.
At the same time, it would be wrong to paint an entirely bleak picture for the segment. AI is not solely a threat to HR Tech. It is creating entirely new needs around productivity, skills, reskilling and collaboration between people and AI agents. I therefore do not expect the sector to decline, but rather the end of HR Tech as we have known it and the emergence of a much broader Work Tech market. That, in turn, could create new investment opportunities for startups and funds interested in the space.
24Ventures: a defensive and offensive investment
Although Talent Bridge has yet to achieve significant scale after several years in business, what mattered to the investor was that the company had built a product, generated revenue and developed a customer base on its own. 24Ventures therefore sees the investment as a combination of a relatively stable, established business and the potential to develop new products.
“The founders have already proven that they can build a business and sell their solutions in the market. The company has an existing business and customer base, so it does not have to build relationships with customers from scratch. That provides a foundation for selling additional products to existing clients.
“That is why we see this investment as a combination of defensive and offensive components. On the one hand, we have existing revenue and a product; on the other, we are investing in developing new areas that could open up a larger market for the company. We have invested PLN 1.75 million (about EUR 410,000) in the company,” says Łukasz Wąsikiewicz, a partner at 24Ventures.
A strategic move forward
The company’s revenue to date has come primarily from psychometric tests. According to Łukasz Wąsikiewicz, however, the founders recognized that the recruitment market in this segment was becoming increasingly competitive and had limited potential for further growth. They therefore decided to expand into additional areas.
“Rather than remain in this space, they decided to make a strategic move forward and develop tools related to onboarding, matching an employee’s profile and talents with a particular company, reskilling and upskilling, and training specific competencies, such as sales,” says the investor.
Talent Bridge fits 24Ventures’ strategy
Talent Bridge also fits within 24Ventures’ broadly defined investment strategy, which the fund describes as the digital economy. Łukasz Wąsikiewicz stresses, however, that the fund does not want to adhere too rigidly to the assumptions it set when it began operating.
“Technology and trends are changing rapidly. As a fund, we therefore also have to be ‘agile’ – watching the market and adapting to what is happening in it. In the case of Talent Bridge, what matters is the use of AI in specific, vertical business applications in HR,” says the 24Ventures partner.
Key Takeaways
- Talent Bridge wants to leverage its existing customer base to enter a larger market. The company has around 100 active clients and a revenue-generating product, but its existing business, based largely on psychometric testing, has limited growth potential. The 24Ventures investment is intended to accelerate the development of new applications for its technology, including onboarding, reskilling, upskilling and skills development.
- In HR Tech, it is becoming increasingly difficult to compete on technology alone. The development of AI is reducing the cost and time required to build new tools, meaning competitive advantage will increasingly come from data, know-how, integration with customers’ processes and user relationships. This could drive market consolidation and the development of platforms covering a larger part of the employee life cycle.
- AI does not mean the end of HR Tech, but a shift in its boundaries. New technologies are creating additional demand for solutions related to productivity, skills, reskilling and collaboration between people and AI agents. For startups, this means finding new applications for their technology, while also opening up space for a broader Work Tech market and new investment opportunities.