# HackerRank
**HackerRank** is a developer skills company that operates a technical hiring platform on which companies screen, interview, and upskill software engineers through coding assessments, and a community where developers practice coding challenges. It was founded by Vivek Ravisankar and [Hari Karunanidhi](https://www.edgepedia.org/harishankaran-karunanidhi-hackerrank), who began the venture in [Bangalore](https://www.edgepedia.org/bangalore) in 2009 under the name InterviewStreet and relaunched it as HackerRank in 2012.[1](https://www.hackerrank.com/about-us/) The company states a mission of changing the world to value skills over pedigree, and reports 2,500 customers, a community of more than 26 million developers, and 172,800 daily skill assessments.[1](https://www.hackerrank.com/about-us/)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2009 as InterviewStreet in Bangalore; relaunched as HackerRank in 2012[1](https://www.hackerrank.com/about-us/) |
| Founders | Vivek Ravisankar (CEO) and Hari Karunanidhi, computer science graduates who had worked at Amazon and IBM[1](https://www.hackerrank.com/about-us/) |
| Funding | $3M Series A (Khosla Ventures, 2011); $9.2M Series B (Indeed/Recruit Holdings, 2015); $30M Series C (JMI Equity, 2018); $60M Series D (Susquehanna Growth Equity, 2022); more than $115M total[1](https://www.hackerrank.com/about-us/) • [2](https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/hackerrank-raises-30m-to-match-developers-with-jobs/) • [3](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hackerrank-raises-60-million-series-d-to-accelerate-the-worlds-innovation-301512548.html) |
| Scale | 2,500 customers; 26M+ developers in the community; 172,800 daily skill assessments[1](https://www.hackerrank.com/about-us/) |
| Content library | 7,000+ questions across 77 roles and 260+ skills; support for 55+ programming languages (a HackerRank comparison page cites 7,500+ questions and 58 languages)[4](https://hiringtechstack.com/compare/hackerrank-vs-codesignal) • [5](https://www.hackerrank.com/writing/remote-coding-interviews-best-technical-screening-tools-q1-2026) |
| AI products | Chakra AI Interviewer for structured technical screens; AI-assisted IDE; AI plagiarism detection[6](https://support.hackerrank.com/articles/5686123513-april-2025-release-notes) • [4](https://hiringtechstack.com/compare/hackerrank-vs-codesignal) |
| Integrations | 40+ published ATS and hiring-system connections, including Workday, Lever, and Greenhouse[4](https://hiringtechstack.com/compare/hackerrank-vs-codesignal) • [7](https://www.hackerrank.com/release/oct-2025) |
## History
The company's origin traces to July 2009, when Vivek Ravisankar and Hari Karunanidhi, computer science graduates then working at Amazon and IBM respectively in Bangalore, spent about a year on interview panels and saw unqualified candidates reach onsite rounds while capable friends were screened out over GPA or lack of a prestigious degree. They quit their jobs to build InterviewStreet, a website that matched mentors with students; hundreds of students signed up across a dozen universities within weeks, and the first payment was a cheque for 413.62 INR ($5.68), a copy of which is displayed in the Bangalore office under the label "Humble Beginnings."[1](https://www.hackerrank.com/about-us/)
In September 2011 the founders raised a $3 million Series A led by [Khosla Ventures](https://www.edgepedia.org/khosla-ventures), and within a year pivoted to a platform that helps companies identify developers based on results on coding challenges. Early customers included Airbnb, Box, and Amazon.[1](https://www.hackerrank.com/about-us/) The developer community grew organically to 1,000,000 by February 2015 without paid marketing to developers, and HackerRank raised a $9.2 million Series B in July 2015 led by Indeed, a subsidiary of Recruit Holdings, which later added a further $7.8 million. By December 2016 the customer base exceeded 1,000 companies across verticals from auto to retail to finance, and 5 of the 8 top banks in America used the platform to evaluate developer candidates.[1](https://www.hackerrank.com/about-us/)
A $30 million Series C led by [JMI Equity](https://www.edgepedia.org/jmi-equity) followed in February 2018, bringing total funding to $58.2 million; at that point the community exceeded 3.4 million developers and customers included five of the top eight commercial banks.[2](https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/hackerrank-raises-30m-to-match-developers-with-jobs/) In December 2019 HackerRank acquired Mimir, an online platform for computer science courses with a built-in IDE supporting 40 programming languages, used at the time by roughly 15,000 to 20,000 students, to extend its reach into academia.[8](https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/17/hackerrank-acquires-mimir-an-online-platform-for-computer-science-courses/) In March 2022 the company raised a $60 million Series D led by Susquehanna Growth Equity, taking total funding above $115 million; the announcement reported more than 2,800 customers, including over 25% of the Fortune 100, and a community of 18 million developers, with 188 million technical challenges and code submissions assessed in the preceding 12 months.[3](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hackerrank-raises-60-million-series-d-to-accelerate-the-worlds-innovation-301512548.html)
## Platform and products
HackerRank organizes its offering around skills and roles. Customers create tests and interviews from roles, each of which maps to one or more skills, using curated skill-based content; interviewer feedback is captured on structured scorecards and aggregated into a candidate packet that serves as a single record of a candidate's results across assessments and interviews.[9](https://support.hackerrank.com/articles/3872148153-skills-on-hackerrank) The platform covers asynchronous screening (Screen) and live technical interviews ([Interview](https://www.edgepedia.org/interview)), the latter providing a shared coding IDE with audio, video, and a whiteboard.[4](https://hiringtechstack.com/compare/hackerrank-vs-codesignal)
**Certified Assessments** are role-based, expert-curated tests intended to standardize technical testing programs; HackerRank uses a third-party content bias checker and conducts fairness and sensitivity reviews by item writers, content experts, psychometricians, and industrial/organizational psychologists.[10](https://support.hackerrank.com/articles/1649328687-hackerrank-certified-assessments) • [11](https://www.hackerrank.com/blog/new-report-how-hackerrank-prioritizes-assessment-fairness-sensitivity/) A university-hiring product line packages the same tooling for high-volume recruiting of new graduates, with plagiarism monitoring and adverse-impact studies on assessment content.[12](https://www.hackerrank.com/lp/university-hiring/)
The April 2025 release introduced an AI Interviewer in limited availability, which conducts conversational technical interviews with progressive questioning, real-time integrity monitoring of tab-switching and pasting, automatically generated candidate reports, and session replay with screen captures and webcam images; the same release added RAG question types and iOS assessments with a built-in emulator.[6](https://support.hackerrank.com/articles/5686123513-april-2025-release-notes) The company's AI interviewer is named Chakra and is positioned as conducting structured technical screens and feeding evidence-backed reports into hiring workflows.[4](https://hiringtechstack.com/compare/hackerrank-vs-codesignal) • [13](https://www.hackerrank.com/blog/can-an-ai-interviewer-reduce-bias-in-technical-hiring/) Later 2025 releases added SkillUp learning paths with an AI Tutor, an AI Engineer Certification, Engage campaigns for reconnecting with past candidates, and scorecard syncing with Workday, Lever, and [Greenhouse](https://www.edgepedia.org/greenhouse).[7](https://www.hackerrank.com/release/oct-2025)
## Integrity and AI-assisted cheating
Assessment integrity has become a central product concern as AI tools spread. HackerRank's published integrity stack includes AI-powered plagiarism detection that the company describes as 93% accurate and three times more accurate than traditional similarity-only methods, alongside tab and copy-paste signals, session replay, screenshot analysis, object detection for external devices such as phones, and analysis of suspicious communication typed and deleted in the code editor.[4](https://hiringtechstack.com/compare/hackerrank-vs-codesignal) The platform also detects multiple external monitor connections and logs changes during a test.[5](https://www.hackerrank.com/writing/remote-coding-interviews-best-technical-screening-tools-q1-2026)
The company's own research quantifies the pressure. In the 2025 Developer Skills Report, based on platform data and a survey of 13,372 developers in 102 countries, 76% of developers said AI makes gaming the system easier, 73% said it is unfair to lose out to candidates who use AI to game tests, and 56% admitted to using AI on their coding assessments.[14](https://pages.hackerrank.com/hubfs/PDFs/HackerRank%202025%20Developer%20Skills%20Report.pdf) Independent security research has found limits of proctoring generally: a USENIX Security 2022 study of four proctoring suites used in law-school and licensing exams found that all their anti-cheating measures could be trivially bypassed and that facial-recognition classifiers varied in accuracy across skin tones.[15](https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/burgess)
## Developer community and research
The developer side of the platform serves practice and certification. The community grew from 1 million developers in February 2015 to more than 18 million by 2022 and more than 26 million in the company's current figures.[1](https://www.hackerrank.com/about-us/) • [3](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hackerrank-raises-60-million-series-d-to-accelerate-the-worlds-innovation-301512548.html) HackerRank also publishes an annual Developer Skills Report drawing on platform data and its global survey. The 2025 edition found that 66% of developers would rather be evaluated on real-world skills, and 96% believe problem-solving should matter more than memorization, while 78% said assessments do not align with real-world tasks and 56% find algorithm-based questions irrelevant to their jobs.[14](https://pages.hackerrank.com/hubfs/PDFs/HackerRank%202025%20Developer%20Skills%20Report.pdf) The same report found 97% of developers use AI assistants and 61% use two or more AI tools at work.[14](https://pages.hackerrank.com/hubfs/PDFs/HackerRank%202025%20Developer%20Skills%20Report.pdf)
## Competitive position
HackerRank competes with CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Codility in technical assessment. Comparison analyses give HackerRank the edge on question-library depth, developer familiarity, integration breadth, and pricing transparency, with a Starter, Pro, and Enterprise plan structure, while CodeSignal leads on standardized benchmarking and industrial-organizational validation of its Certified Assessments; CoderPad focuses on live interview speed but lacks webcam monitoring.[4](https://hiringtechstack.com/compare/hackerrank-vs-codesignal) • [5](https://www.hackerrank.com/writing/remote-coding-interviews-best-technical-screening-tools-q1-2026) On G2, HackerRate's skill assessments are rated 9.4 out of 10.[5](https://www.hackerrank.com/writing/remote-coding-interviews-best-technical-screening-tools-q1-2026) A recurring criticism from developers, echoed in HackerRank's own survey data, is that timed algorithmic assessments measure test-taking under pressure rather than work on a real codebase; the 2025 report's finding that 62% of developers feel forced to overprepare on algorithm-heavy assessments is the company's own quantification of that gap.[14](https://pages.hackerrank.com/hubfs/PDFs/HackerRank%202025%20Developer%20Skills%20Report.pdf)
## References
1. [About Us, HackerRank](https://www.hackerrank.com/about-us/)
2. [HackerRank raises $30M to match developers with jobs, TechCrunch (February 13, 2018)](https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/hackerrank-raises-30m-to-match-developers-with-jobs/)
3. [HackerRank Raises $60 Million Series D to Accelerate The World's Innovation, PR Newswire (March 29, 2022)](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hackerrank-raises-60-million-series-d-to-accelerate-the-worlds-innovation-301512548.html)
4. [HackerRank vs CodeSignal: Technical Assessment Platforms Compared (2026), Hiring Tech Stack](https://hiringtechstack.com/compare/hackerrank-vs-codesignal)
5. [Remote coding interviews: Best technical screening tools (Q1 2026), HackerRank](https://www.hackerrank.com/writing/remote-coding-interviews-best-technical-screening-tools-q1-2026)
6. [April 2025 Release Notes, HackerRank Knowledge Base](https://support.hackerrank.com/articles/5686123513-april-2025-release-notes)
7. [October 2025 Release, HackerRank](https://www.hackerrank.com/release/oct-2025)
8. [HackerRank acquires Mimir, an online platform for computer science courses, TechCrunch (December 17, 2019)](https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/17/hackerrank-acquires-mimir-an-online-platform-for-computer-science-courses/)
9. [Skills on HackerRank, HackerRank Knowledge Base](https://support.hackerrank.com/articles/3872148153-skills-on-hackerrank)
10. [HackerRank Certified Assessments, HackerRank Knowledge Base](https://support.hackerrank.com/articles/1649328687-hackerrank-certified-assessments)
11. [New Report: How HackerRank Prioritizes Assessment Fairness & Sensitivity, HackerRank Blog (December 15, 2020)](https://www.hackerrank.com/blog/new-report-how-hackerrank-prioritizes-assessment-fairness-sensitivity/)
12. [University Hiring, HackerRank](https://www.hackerrank.com/lp/university-hiring/)
13. [Can an AI Interviewer Reduce Bias in Technical Hiring?, HackerRank Blog](https://www.hackerrank.com/blog/can-an-ai-interviewer-reduce-bias-in-technical-hiring/)
14. [2025 Developer Skills Report, HackerRank](https://pages.hackerrank.com/hubfs/PDFs/HackerRank%202025%20Developer%20Skills%20Report.pdf)
15. [Watching the watchers: bias and vulnerability in remote proctoring software, USENIX Security 22](https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/burgess)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Technology and the built world › Computing and digital systems › Software and programming › Software industry and companies › IT services and consulting*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 15, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026 · Last review: Oct 15, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license