Southeast Asian career platform Glints said it raised USD 22.5 million in an oversubscribed Series C round led by Tokyo-listed human resources firm Persol Holdings. The raise also included participation from existing backers Monk’s Hill Ventures, Fresco Capital, Mindworks Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, and other investors, including Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and former Goldman Sachs executive Xiaoyin Zhang.
The company said it plans to use the new funds to deepen its footprint in Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Taiwan. Oswald Yeo, co-founder and CEO of Glints, told Tech in Asia that the startup will headline its expansion with the rollout of its talent ecosystem in the region.
“With the pandemic accelerating the future of work and causing big changes in the labor market, our mission to empower the 120 million professionals in Southeast Asia is more important than ever,” Yeo said.
The CEO shared that Glints spent a lot of time adapting and evaluating its business after the COVID-19 crisis hit last year. It saw a rising demand for remote hiring in Southeast Asia and so doubled down on its cross-border talent solution Talent Hub.
Glints expects this increased preference in remote hiring to persist even after the pandemic, with employers seeing a boost in employee productivity given the reduced travel time and their increased capacity to tap into a wider pool of applicants. Some of the company’s clients are Gojek, Tokopedia, FWD Insurance, Starbucks, and Mediacorp.
With the surge in remote hiring, Glints claims it was able to more than double its annual revenue in 2020. It aims to continue the growth this year.
It also said that its operations in Indonesia, Vietnam, and Singapore are already profitable, and that it’s seeing positive contribution margins across all of its business units. Glints’ Hong Kong and Taiwan markets are also on track to become profitable by the end of this year, the CEO added.
The company will be building up more products in its ecosystem, namely its localized career forum Glints Community, its online-coding boot camp Glints Academy, and its professional courses business Glints ExpertClass. As part of this plan, Glints aims to make more hires, mainly for its product and engineering teams.
Its funding announcement comes a week after Glints released a joint study with Monk’s Hill, which highlighted how Southeast Asia remains an attractive market for tech recruitment despite increasing compensation packages in the region. It also examined its increasing talent crunch, a problem Glints aims to solve through its platform.