Canvas, a San Francisco-based diversity recruitment platform, announced a Series C round of $50 million led by Owl Ventures, with participation from Sequoia, Lachy Groom, Zoom Apps Fund, HighSage Ventures, BAM Elevate, and Fifth Down Capital. Coupled with the Series C is the launch of a new product, Canvas Diversity Analytics & Benchmarking. Canvas has a stated goal of offering a differentiated approach for understanding, benchmarking, and evolving diversity in the workplace through access to a large pool of self-reported candidate diversity data.

The company raised a B round of $20 million in May, and rebranded from Jumpstart to Canvas. With the latest round, the companies valuation is $400 million.

The self-reporting is a key part of the companies secret sauce, as inferred data on diversity is often at best inaccurate, and at worst, illegal.

"The biggest problem in recruiting right now isn't talent or opportunity, it's data," said Ben Herman, CEO of Canvas. "Every company may have good intentions to spearhead diversity initiatives, but research shows that most diversity programs aren't increasing diversity. We want to change that for businesses by improving accessibility to the best underrepresented talent with insights based on self reported data - while creating systems of accountability that actually move the needle."

Diversity and inclusion has remained a front-and-center theme in the workforce. And now, for the first time in over 30 years, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission modified its disclosure rules, requiring that public companies provide a far greater window into their human capital management than ever before. Previously, organizations only had to disclose their number of employees. Today, they must divulge human capital metrics considered to be material to an understanding of the company's business, including diversity and inclusion.

"Canvas is providing best-in-class recruiting tools that will revolutionize the way companies hire exceptional and diverse talent. We believe self-reported data is the new gold standard in modern day recruitment and Canvas is poised to take the lead in this category. We are incredibly impressed with the passion and dedication of the Canvas management team and cannot wait to support them as they become the industry standard for diversity recruiting in the US and around the world," said Jenny Wang, Investor at Owl Ventures.

Canvas' new Diversity Analytics & Benchmarking product provides companies with detailed data insights and diversity benchmarks, so hiring teams can uncover diversity disparities, identify biases and track progress in real time. Additionally, the product allows companies to get visibility into their own diversity hiring metrics relative to companies of similar industries and sizes. Recruiters can view at-a-glance how their top-of-funnel compares, grouped by ethnicity or gender from the analytics dashboard, and spot and prioritize equity efforts more confidently to achieve diversity hiring goals.

With 3x revenue growth YOY, Canvas plans to use the Series C proceeds to expand its product into other industries and verticals outside of technology, and address later stages of people's careers. The company will also make new R&D investments to further develop the Canvas platform's insights and recommendation systems.