Qneiform

💼 Budapest-based Qneiform recently bagged €3M in seed funding, co-led by Day One Capital and PROfounders Capital from UK! Founded in 2022 by Thomas Percy, a UK-native exec search leader turned expat, this AI-powered platform helps organizations finally see the talent market clearly—no more over-reliance on expensive external recruiters. ⚡️ Their next move? Expanding beyond Europe & the US, diving into new verticals besides the HR world in finance, and supercharging their data science to link talent decisions to real business outcomes. 🙌 Learn more about how Qneiform transforms the way companies find their ideal hires during our next First Monday event on the 7th of April, where Thomas will be our guest speaker! Link below.

🚀💡 Budapest-based Qneiform has secured €3M in seed funding, led by PROfounders Capital and Dayone Capital, with continued backing from Keen Ventures and DFF Ventures (Dutch Founders Fund). This marks one of Hungary’s largest seed rounds, showing strong confidence in its ability to transform how businesses make talent decisions. 🔥🇭🇺 The fresh capital will drive Qneiform’s expansion beyond financial services, where it has already gained traction. It will enhance proprietary data models, scale its platform, and grow its data science and engineering teams. 👀 Read more: https://lnkd.in/dmhQ77EF Thomas Percy Joe Bond Xavier C. Steven Bosch Katalin Gaal #hrtech #talentintelligence #ai #startups #fundingnews #hungary #futureofwork #funding #news #hiring #eutech #innovation

🎄As we reach the final day of our Advent calendar, we're excited to open one of the most iconic names in private equity… 💥As well as transforming the private equity industry wholesale through pioneering junk bond financing for takeovers (a model which survives and thrives to this day), Drexel Burnham Lambert can be found in the lineage of many of today’s private equity giants, perhaps most notably, Apollo Global Management, Inc. ✨Even more so than Carlyle, who we featured yesterday, Apollo shows a predilection for investment bankers, with 66% of the current team hailing from that talent pool (as it happens, the three founders of the firm were all in the M&A department at Drexel). Indeed, every single spot in the top-10 sources of talent is taken up by an investment bank, with a unsurprising bias for the sort of firms where large-cap transaction experience is a given. 👀Interestingly, for a firm with a strong tendency to hire at a junior level (62% of the team join as juniors), around four-fifths of the MD and Partner contingent joined after this stage. 📊Apollo is also somewhat under the index average when it comes to gender diversity, with a 20% female investment team (compared to an index average of 25%). The delta is even higher when comparing hires from the last 5 years with 23% for Apollo compared with 31% across large and mega-cap funds more generally. ✨🎅🏻 With all the windows on our PE advent calendar now open, it’s time to sign off for the year. Wishing everyone a very merry Christmas and holiday period. See you all in 2025! 🎁

🎅 👀 Very few private equity firms are named after 19th century Scottish philosophers (even indirectly), though The Carlyle Group has always been cut from a slightly different cloth to most funds. Founded in Washington in 1987, its very location betrays a longstanding association with government connections and defence deals, counting multiple former world leaders on its advisory board at any one time.   🎓 The legacy of this foundational heritage is still evident today with it being the only firm of its size to hire more professionals from Georgetown than either Harvard or Wharton. Somewhat incongruously, it’s also the only firm we can find where hospitality management is one of the ten most common subjects investment professionals read at university. 💡 In terms of hiring patterns, Carlyle has a very strong bias for investment banking talent, with nearly 61% coming from that background (compared to 45% across the index). Indeed, BCG is the only non-bank to make it into the top-10 sources of talent. 📈 Interestingly, Carlyle has seen more than double the index rate of departures this year, losing nearly 14% of its investment team (with Blackstone and KKR proving the two largest beneficiaries). Given fundraising success this year and optimism around deal making in 2025, we anticipate somewhat of an uptick in hiring across the organisation, particularly at the junior and mid-level.

🎁 💡 Not to be confused with the similarly named Ajax armoured fighting vehicle (named after a Homerian hero), Apax is named after one of its founders, Alan Patricof, initially trading as Alan Patricof Associates before adopting Apax Partners in the early 90s.   🔎 Although generally quite conventional in terms of hiring tendencies, Apax does exhibit one odd quirk in that whilst investment banking and management consulting forms the majority of the firm’s intake, it nevertheless has managed to hire more professionals from Bain Capital than from Bain & Co. 📊 They also exhibit one of the most pronounced spikes in post-pandemic hiring, with almost 22% of the investment team having joined in 2021 alone (about double what we would typically see). Overall, around 55% of the current team have joined since 2021 though whether such a rate of growth can continue into the future is yet to be seen.   📣 In terms of departing talent, Apax professionals seem particularly sought after by mid-market British funds with a reputation for being hands-on and perhaps surprisingly, a number of hedge funds, notably being the leading buyside source of talent for Elliott Management.

🎅❄️ Founded in 1984 by partners from Bain & Company (including former presidential hopeful and undershirt enthusiast Mitt Romney), Bain Capital was intended to demonstrate the operational improvements management consulting could achieve in a private equity setting (in contrast to the financial engineering that drove most funds’ returns).   💡 Given this origin story, it’s no surprise that Bain Capital is the most consultant friendly of its peers, with 31% of hires joining from consulting (compared to an index average of 11%). Indeed, Bain & Co, McKinsey and BCG tie up the podium, with Goldman Sachs a distant fourth place when it comes to sourcing talent. 🌟 Whilst 69% of hires join as juniors, the majority of MDs (67%) were brought in as more experienced hires (considerably above the index average). On gender diversity Bain scores well with female professionals accounting for 31% of the investing team (compared to 25% across the index). The tendency toward consultants probably helps here with management consultancies demonstrating considerably higher levels of gender diversity compared to investment banks (13 points higher at a junior level). Particularly notably for Bain, 21% of senior investment professionals are female, well ahead of peer firms (who average 14%).

🥁 🎄 The questionable relationship between PE funds and acronyms is fast becoming our favourite topic, so we wanted to take the chance to cover at least one more before festivities are drawn to a close. CVC began life as Citicorp Venture Capital though as far as we can tell, the venture capital reference is a bit of a red herring.   👏 Probably best known for their success with sports and media assets, they are widely credited for laying the groundwork for Formula One’s resurgence (though Netflix may beg to differ). They also own upstart IPL franchise, Gujarat Titans, stunning cricketing fans by winning their inaugural season in 2022 with an unfancied team of journeymen players.   ⏳ When it comes to their own internal transfers however, CVC has the clout and comp structure (everyone loves deal-by-deal carry), to attract the best. Junior talent is drawn from exclusively blue-chip employers with Goldman Sachs far out in front, followed by JP Morgan, McKinsey, Morgan Stanley, and Bain & Co..   🎁 They’re also remarkably good at minimising churn, witnessing only a 2.8% drawdown of talent in 2024 (compared to an index average of 6.7%).   👀 PE is somewhat underserved by PhDs (at least compared to other strategies) with on average, less than 1% of investment professionals holding doctorates. This compares to 5% for L/S Equity professionals, 11% for macro investors, and a whopping 27% for quants in general. CVC doesn’t exactly buck this trend but alongside Bain Capital, is more than 3x as likely as PE peers to have a PhD on their deal team (which is fractionally more likely than finding a medical doctor in their stead, with 2% of the team having attended medical school).

🎄 🎁 Back in the 90s, the term ‘Tiger Cubs’ came to refer to hedge funds founded by individuals who had worked at Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management. Equally, in the tech world similar multigenerational phenomena are observed (see the Paypal or Skype ‘mafias’). The same is true (although arguably to a lesser extent – potentially due to the longer half-life of investments and scale-related barriers to entry inherent to private investing), within private equity.   👀 Francisco Partners is one of the more successful examples. Founded by individuals from TPG and TA Associates in 1999, it was one of the first firms to focus specifically on technology buyouts. 💼 Its hiring practices perhaps say more about the relative strengths of banking franchises than anything else, with Morgan Stanley contributing three times as many junior professionals as any other bank (MS historically had an incredibly strong franchise in Menlo Park before losing multiple key individuals more recently). Equally, when bringing in buyside professionals, it’s no surprise that Silverlake (another 2nd generation SF headquartered tech PE fund founded in 1999) is the top source of talent. 🔎 Like many US firms, it demonstrates a bias towards very junior talent, with 43% of the team with less than 3 years’ experience. Somewhat atypically for US funds is the tendency to develop junior talent into leaders within the firm, with 67% of MDs having joined as junior professionals.   📊 For a west-coast firm it exhibits a peculiar tendency to hire from typical east-coast schools for its SF office and then demonstrate the exact opposite elsewhere. Across NY and London, typical stalwarts Harvard and Wharton (1 and 2 , respectively, in SF) don’t feature in the top-20 undergraduate schools at all (oddly, neither does Oxford) with Wharton just about making it onto the post-graduate top-10 in (9th place).

🎅 🎄 Since spinning out of Schroders in the mid-90s, Permira has carved a furrow as one of the most active British funds on the world stage, acquiring a string of household names at various points ranging from the AA to McAfee and more recently, Squarespace. 🔎 On the talent front they seem in many ways like a microcosm of the broader PE index, with the composition of the team matching almost to the percentage point the sort of distribution we see on average elsewhere. Perhaps the only nod to a British identity is the slightly unexpected appearance of Barclays as one of their top ten sources of talent, rubbing shoulders with the usual suspects of GS, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and MBB. 👀 The most notable difference is probably a strong tendency to develop talent internally with 60% of MDs having joined the funds as junior professionals (almost double the industry average).   📉 Interestingly, in spite of a relatively recent fundraise (closing fund VIII in 2023), they’re one of the handful of firms to be appreciably net negative on the headcount front this year (c.-4% compared to an index average of +4%). In fact, after ramping up post-pandemic (like most funds) to a hiring peak in 2022, there’s been an appreciably sharper drop-off in activity. Let’s see whether 2025 bucks this trend.

⏳ 🎁 Over the last 31 years, TPG has firmly established itself in the first rank of PE funds, with c.$240bn AuM and hiring practices that are more than a match for any fund. 📊 In terms of firms being profiled in this series, TPG has by far the highest Q-score of the funds featured to-date. This is our proprietary metric that takes into account the calibre of backgrounds of candidates joining the fund and the sort of opportunities departees are willing to leave for. It serves as a proxy for the desirability of the firm in the market, and its prestige as a source of talent. The scores work on a modified ELO system, with TPG’s 2104.91 being one of the highest scores we’ve seen in PE.   💡 Interestingly, they are by far the most reliant on investment banking talent of the funds we’ve looked at, with 61% of hires joining straight from a bank (compared to 45% for the index). Despite very rarely hiring straight from university (2% of the current team), there is a strong preference for bringing in junior talent with 43% of the team joining with less than three years’ experience, rising to 75% joining with less than five years’ experience (20 points higher than is typical). 👀 Unlike some firms we’ve looked at, they successfully retain a significant portion of that junior talent, with 44% of current MDs having joined as juniors (compared to 36.5% of the index). When people do leave, it is almost exclusively for other leading funds, with Advent and Blackstone being the primary beneficiaries of TPG’s talent.