Recruitment firm Glints raises US$22.5m led by Tokyo-listed Persol Holdings

GLINTS, a talent-recruitment and career-development platform based in Singapore, has raised US$22.5 million in a Series C round led by Tokyo-listed human resources group Persol Holdings.

Existing investors that participated in the round include Monk's Hill Ventures, Fresco Capital, Mindworks Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and Xiaoyin Zhang, the ex-Goldman Sachs partner who helped bring Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba public.

Glints' last fund-raising brought in US$6.8 million in July 2019, which resulted in a post-money valuation of US$19.4 million, said data platform VentureCap Insights.

The new funds will go into building more features and solutions on its full-stack talent platform, deepen the company's footprint in Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and Taiwan, and expand its product and engineering teams.

Glints' Talent Ecosystem platform is meant to support professionals in their entire career discovery and development, combining a community forum, skills education and an online job marketplace.

Clients that have used it include Gojek, Tokopedia, FWD Insurance, Starbucks and Mediacorp. On average, clients make successful hires in 28 days, compared to industry standards of 40 to 50 days, and at recruitment costs 40 to 100 per cent cheaper, Glints said.

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Despite the pandemic, revenue in 2020 more than doubled, continuing the trend of annual revenues growing at triple-digit percentages for the past three years, the company added. Glints said it also sees positive contribution margins across all business units, with the Indonesia and Vietnam markets already profitable.

The company's job marketplace has 7,000 monthly active job listings. Glints also provides professional courses online with over 2,000 monthly active participants and an online coding bootcamp with over 400 graduates to date.

Oswald Yeo, co-founder and chief executive of Glints, said the pandemic is accelerating the future of work and causing big changes in the labour market.

"We are scaling Glints as a full-stack talent platform to support the professionals in South-east Asia with their career discovery and development and to solve the regional talent crunch for employers," he said.