Social Capital’s first Southeast Asia investment is an Indonesian HR startup

The Urbanhire team. Photo credit: Urbanhire.

Indonesia-based Urbanhire – which develops software to help companies manage their recruiting process – announced its pre-series A financing round today.

The round was led by local VC Convergence Ventures. The amount raised wasn’t disclosed. Social Capital, 500 Startups, Tortola Capital, Denali Capital, Kk Fund, and Intrafood Group also participated.

The investment is Social Capital’s first in Southeast Asia, says Urbanhire.

This makes Social Capital the latest established US VC firm to seek opportunity in the region. Tim Draper also recently announced his first Southeast Asia investment.

Social Capital is known for backing enterprise chat software Slack and other global software-as-a-service (SaaS) unicorns like SurveyMonkey. Its founder, Chamath Palihapitiya, started his career as an early employee of Facebook.

The Silicon Valley firm’s expertise in helping enterprise SaaS startups grow led to its interest in Urbanhire, the startup’s co-founder and CEO Benson Kawengian told Tech in Asia.

Social Capital joined the round later in the day, with Convergence Ventures and 500 Startups already committed.

None of the new investors are joining the startup’s board as part of this round, Kawengian says, though there’s a chance this might change with future capital raises.

Sticky product

Founded in early 2016, Urbanhire enables more efficient recruiting, allowing employers to post and update job openings at multiple job portals at the same time, track applications, and coordinate teams throughout the entire hiring process.

The company is seeing impressively high employee engagement and employer retention.

Urbanhire now has 2,500 businesses subscribing to its software, according to Kawengian. It integrates with 40 job portals. It counts large institutions like Indonesia’s public healthcare provider BPJS and media group Kompas Gramedia as clients.

Kawengian says the product’s high retention rate is promising, with some firms logging “thousands of sessions” on the platform once they’ve signed up.

This also seems to have caught Social Capital’s attention. “The company is seeing impressively high employee engagement and employer retention,” partner Ashley Carroll is quoted as saying in today’s press release.