Glints, the Singapore-based career platform, announced today it has raised $22.5 million in Series C funding led by Japanese human resources management firm PERSOL Holdings. The new capital will be used on Glints’ expansion in Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and Taiwan and hiring for its product and engineering teams.
Glints co-founder and chief executive officer Oswald Yeo said this is the largest funding round to date for a talent platform in Southeast Asia, and brings the startup’s total raised to $33 million. Other participants included returning investors Monk’s Hill Ventures, Fresco Capital, Mindworks Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and former Goldman Sachs TMT China head and partner Xiaoyin Zhang.
Founded in 2013, Glints says it has been used by more than 1.5 million professionals and 30,000 organizations, including Gojek, Tokopedia, Starbucks and Mediacorp. Most of its current users are from the tech and financial services sectors, but Glints has a “broad horizontal focus on young to mid-level professionals,” and its long-term goal is to be sector agnostic, Yeo told TechCrunch.
One of the ways Glints differentiates from other job platforms active in its markets, like LinkedIn, JobStreet and CakeResume, is by building a “full-stack” of services for people who want to advance their careers. In addition to its job marketplace, which the company says has more than 7,000 active listings and 4 million visitors each month, Glints also offers community features and skills education, like online classes.
One of Glints’ value propositions is helping companies, especially in tech, cope with the regional talent shortage, a topic it recently covered in a comprehensive report with Monk’s Hill Ventures.
One of the solutions the report highlighted is hiring teams based in different Southeast Asian countries to address talent crunches in specific markets, like Singapore. Glints says its cross-border remote work hub, TalentHub, doubled its business in 2020 as the pandemic also made employers more open to hiring remotely.