For reinventing how technology companies hire programmers and for penetrating into silicon valley’s inner circle. Its community boasts of 864,000 developers and it helps over 1000 companies including the likes of evernote, quora, flipkart, cisco and zenefits with recruiting software developers.

Incorporated in April 2011, HackerRank is perceived as a brand that helps companies hire the best tech talent and build a robust engineering team. It is a platform where programmers from around the world gather to code for fun, win prizes, and get jobs. It also helps companies source, screen and hire programming talent up to 75 per cent faster  than normal.

The company currently has 100 employees globally and the founders, Harishankaran Karunanidhi, Vivek Ravisankar have kept the work environment at the organisation casual with flexible working hours.  As far as the funding goes, apart from seed funding of US $ 200,000 in June 2011, it has raised two rounds of funds to the tune of US $ 12.2 million from Khosla Ventures, Battery Ventures, Y-Combinator, Zenshin Capital, TheMorpheus, Peeyush Ranjan and Dan Rubenstein.

Widespread Impact: Candidates are given an opportunity to showcase their skills and compete at the highest level, even if they do not have a degree from a top ranked university. It helps companies to hire the best programming talent, irrespective of their educational background. 

Key features: It has automated the process of Code evaluation through CodeCheckers built into the platform which ranks the top candidates based on performance. The platform also has an integrated technical interview tool called CodePair which allows hiring managers to do more than have a simple Audio/Video remote interview session. 

Path Ahead: In the next three years, the company aims to improve its geographical footprint and grow its customer base to over 6000 paying customers globally and also grow the community of programmers beyond the 10 million mark. It aims to be a billion dollar company over the next 5 years and build a meritocratic platform where the only thing that matters is the programmer’s objectively-measured skill.