Wamly raises R50 million to help companies hire better people, faster
Wamly, a South African hiring platform that brings structured video interviews, psychometric assessments, background checks, and applicant tracking into one system, has raised a R50 million Series A funding round led by Hlayisani Capital through its Hlayisani Venture Fund II, with existing investor Knife Capital participating in the round.
The funding will be used to accelerate AI-powered hiring, expand Wamlyjobs, and support the company’s international growth.
The problem employers are having
“The conversation right now is all about AI removing jobs, but walk into almost any large or fast-growing employer and you’ll find the opposite problem,” said Francois de Wet, Founder and CEO of Wamly.
“They need to hire enormous numbers of people, and doing it well is slow, expensive and full of guesswork.”
The challenge looks different for every organisation. Some businesses run continuous hiring across multiple sites with dedicated recruitment teams.
Others fill only a handful of roles each year, with hiring becoming an extra responsibility on top of someone’s primary job.
What does not change is the difficulty of making the right decision or the cost of getting it wrong.
Most hiring still runs on a collection of disconnected systems: a job board, a spreadsheet, an assessment provider, a verification vendor, and email holding everything together.
Every handover adds days to the process and every delay increases the chances of losing the best candidate to another opportunity.
When hiring pressure builds, organisations often shorten the process instead of improving it and decision quality suffers as a result.
Built by psychologists, not bolted together
Wamly was founded by de Wet, an industrial psychologist registered with the Health Professions Council of South Africa.
While many hiring platforms are built around what is easiest to develop, Wamly was built around the science of how people should be selected for work.
Decades of research consistently show that structured hiring, where every candidate answers the same questions, produces better hiring outcomes than unstructured interviews.
It removes much of the noise created by inconsistent interview questions, varying interviewer styles, candidates being assessed in different ways and impressive CVs overshadowing applicants who are ultimately a better fit for the role.
With Wamly, instead of switching between multiple systems, hiring managers have everything in one place.
Every candidate is scored and ranked, with video interview responses, skills test results, psychometric assessments, and background checks available from a single screen.
The full picture is immediately visible, making hiring decisions faster, more consistent, and easier to justify.
Candidates benefit too. Recorded interviews mean they do not need to take unpaid leave for a short screening interview.
Every applicant answers the same questions, creating a fairer process where personal connections no longer provide an unfair advantage.
Decisions are based on evidence rather than memory.
The platform is faster by design. Recorded interviews eliminate scheduling delays, while assessments and verification checks run within the same system instead of being exported between multiple vendors.
Candidate comparisons happen automatically rather than manually in spreadsheets.
Wamly also grows with the organisations that use it.
Businesses can start with the features they need today and expand as they grow, without paying for enterprise functionality they do not yet require.
Whether hiring for a single critical role or recruiting continuously across multiple locations, the same platform scales alongside the business.
Today, more than one million candidates have been through the platform. Wamly is ISO 27001 certified, a B-BBEE Level 3 contributor, and is built to meet both South African and international data privacy requirements.
In 2023, the company was named Tech Startup of the Year at Innovation City in Cape Town.
Better people, hired faster, with a decision you can stand behind.
Where the R50 million goes
AI across the entire process from writing the advert through to final decision—reducing administration, surfacing better insights at every stage, and ensuring the final hiring decision remains with people.
Wamly will continue expanding the Wamlyjobs portal into a destination where anyone in South Africa can find work, while helping employers connect with actively job-seeking candidates.
The investment will support Wamly’s expansion into new international markets, taking a platform built for one of the world’s most complex labour markets into countries facing many of the same hiring challenges.
Why the investors backed it
“Wamly is precisely the kind of South African business we built this fund to support: real technology, solving a real problem, with the potential to win well beyond our borders,” said Brett Commaille, Partner at Hlayisani Capital.
“We are delighted to continue our support through this growth round and to partner with such an outstanding team as they scale the business to the next level,” said Johnathan Smit, Investment Manager at Knife Capital.
“Hiring is the highest-stakes decision most companies make, and it is still the one they make with the least evidence. That is what we are here to change,” said de Wet.
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