Glints, a Singapore-based HR-tech company focusing on career development and recruitment, has raised US$22.5 million in a Series C funding round led by Tokyo-listed PERSOL Holdings.
Returning investors, including Monk’s Hill Ventures, Fresco Capital, Mindworks Ventures and Wavemaker Partners, besides angels such as Binny Bansal (co-founder of Flipkart) and Xiaoyin Zhang (former Head and Partner at Goldman Sachs TMT China) also participated in the round.
As per a press release, the oversubscribed round is the largest investment into an online career platform in Southeast Asia to date. The company previously raised US$6.8 million in a Series B funding round led by Monk’s Hill Ventures in July 2019.
Glints said the fresh funds will go towards developing additional features and solutions on its platform and expanding its presence in Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and Taiwan. It also intends to scale its product and engineering teams.
Launched in 2013, Glints combines community forums, skills education (Academy and ExpertClass) and job features (Job Marketplace) to provide a full-stack talent platform that supports professionals in their career discovery and development. The company claims over four million professionals visit its platform every month.
For employers, Glints provides a tech-enabled recruitment solution that it claims is twice as efficient as traditional recruiters. Its clientele includes gojek, Tokopedia, FWD Insurance, Starbucks and Mediacorp.
Despite headwinds from the pandemic, Glints noted it has seen “resilient” growth in 2020 with annual revenues more than doubling, continuing the trend of annual revenues growing at triple-digit percentages for the past three years.
The company also remarked it sees positive contribution margins across all business units, with Indonesia and Vietnam markets already profitable.
“With the pandemic accelerating the future of work and causing big changes in the labour market, our mission to empower the 120 million professionals in Southeast Asia is more important than ever. Existing solutions are transactional job portals and traditional recruiters that only provide part of the solution,” shared Oswald Yeo, co-founder & CEO of Glints.
“We are scaling Glints as a full-stack talent platform to support the professionals in Southeast Asia with their career discovery and development and to solve the regional talent crunch for employers,” he added.
“I am excited that we are strengthening our partnership with Glints. With PERSOL Group’s commercial distribution and experience in Asia and Glints’ leading tech-enabled talent platform, we will empower professionals in Southeast Asia and help solve the talent crunch in Southeast Asia,” opined Takayuki Yamazaki, CEO of PERSOL Asia Pacific.
“Oswald and his team have fundamentally reimagined a job seeker and employer’s journey in the context of the future of work. The speed at which they’ve achieved sustainable revenues with solid business fundamentals and the scale at which they have built a substantial talent and employer base is astounding,” remarked Peng T. Ong, Managing Partner of Monk’s Hill Ventures.
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