Glints bags $22.5m funding after seeing 2x growth in revenue in 2020

A recent joint study released by Glints and Monk’s Hill highlighted how Southeast Asia remains an attractive market for tech recruitment despite increasing compensation packages in the region. This rising demand, coupled with the Covid-19 pandemic further increasing the value of key hires, has exacerbated the talent crunch being faced in the region.

This is a problem Glints aims to solve through its tech-enabled careers platform, its co-founder and CEO Oswald Yeo told Tech in Asia. The Singapore-based startup announced it raised US$22.5 million in an oversubscribed series C round to help rollout its talent ecosystem in the region.

The Glints team / Photo credit: Glints

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.

With the surge in remote hiring, Glints claims it was able to more than double its annual revenue in 2020.

While the company did not disclose specific financial details, Glints’ annual revenue a year earlier had grown by over 4x to stand at US$3.2 million, according to data from VentureCap Insights. This would mean that Glints’ annual revenue in 2020 has climbed to approximately US$6.4 million.

It aims to continue growing its revenues by a three-digit percentage this year, Yeo added.

The company 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.

“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.

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.

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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.