Alan Bourne
CEO, Sova

Meet the founders

As an experienced Chartered Organisational Psychologist, Sova founder and CEO, Alan Bourne, knows about talent assessment – and recognised that it needed to change. Legacy assessment solutions and technology leave organisations with siloed, disjointed platforms that don’t talk to one another, with a poor candidate experience and fraught with bias. Recognising the deep inefficiency of legacy approaches, he turned the assessment market on its head, creating a centralised Assessment Experience Platform that minimises wasted resources at the same time as improving the effectiveness, fairness and quality of hire. This transformative approach is a critical, strategic tool for enterprise organisations to gain accurate, predictive insight about their workforce.

“Sova enables organisations to digitally assess people and therefore make fairer decisions, which is better for diversity and inclusion.”

Alan Bourne

Why we invested

When we met Alan and the Sova team, we’d been interested in the HR Tech space for a while. We were looking for a business aligned with our values, that recognised the power of technology to eliminate bias and contributed to a more equitable hiring landscape. Alan has deep domain expertise, and an outstanding reputation in the sector, while the Sova platform was well positioned to respond to the new demands of talent acquisition that emerged in the wake of the pandemic that are being sustained today. With its world-class digital platform, underpinned by robust science, we believe Sova will play a major part in levelling the playing field, helping organisations select, retain and develop talent in a fairer, more efficient way.

Initial investment stage

Series A

First invested

2022