College dropouts raise $2m for youth job site Glints

From left: Glints founders Qin En Looi, Ying Cong Seah, and Oswald Yeo.

Glints, a jobs discovery site for youths, has raised US$2 million in series A funding. The round is led by Golden Equator Capital and Gobi Partners, and joined by Wavemaker Partners and Fresco Capital.

Existing investors East Ventures, Singapore Infocomm Investments (IIPL), Pix Vine Capital, and angel investors including property site 99.co’s founder Darius Cheung joined the round.

The founders have all left their universities to focus fully on the startup. Oswald Yeo, Ying Cong Seah, and Qin En Looi were bound for Wharton Business School, Stanford, and Berkeley respectively.

“The universities are still holding the spot for us (that’s what’s great about US universities), but we have no plans to go back anytime soon. We dropped our scholarships and our families can’t really afford the price tag of the overseas education, so financially we can’t go back even if we wanted to right now,” says co-founder Oswald Yeo.

Glints focuses on helping youths discover their future careers and developing the right skill sets. It has a skills tree to guide the users’ progress and recommends job opportunities and education resources to acquire these skills.

In 2015, the startup raised US$475,000 in seed funding from investors. Back then, it had 7,000 registered users. Today, it has over 170,000, and just launched in Indonesia. Its current monthly active users is around 30,000.

It spent about US$9,000 on marketing to achieve those numbers, it says on its blog.

Daren Tan, managing partner of Golden Equator Capital, elaborated on why he backed the startup:

“We invested in Glints due to its potential to scale. Indonesia took only a month to achieve the same 30,000 user sign­ups that Singapore did in 12 months. The quick adoption shows the huge untapped potential in the Indonesian market.”