HR tech firm Glints gets $22.5M to expand across Asia

Glints, a Singapore-based career development and recruitment platform, has raised a $22.5 million Series C round led by PERSOL Holdings, a Japanese HR management firm.

Founded in 2013, Glints will use the money to grow in Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Taiwan and expand its engineering and product teams.

With a $33 million in funding to date, Glints also drew support from existing backers including 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.

“Like for many startups out there, 2020 was a challenging year for Glints,” said Oswald Yeo, the co-founder and CEO.

“Fortunately, thanks to some market tailwinds for our products and the hard work of the Glints team, by year-end, we managed to scale up to having over 4 million professionals visit Glints’ platform every month in pursuit of career development, and have served the talent needs of over 35,000 employers across the region to date,” he added.

According to TechCrunch, Glints differs from other job platforms such as LinkedIn because it’s created a “full-stack” of services for individuals looking to advance their careers.

Additionally, Glints also offers learning and development opportunities such as online classes. It’s also seeking to help companies in the region cope with talent shortages.

HR tech is hot

Glints’ raise comes amid a flurry of VC activity in HR tech. A few weeks ago, PayFit, an HR tech startup based in France, closed a $107 million Series D funding round (€90 million).

This was closely followed by Lattice’s $60 million Series E and Ginger’s $110 raise. Overall, Work Tech’s latest report found that Q1 2021 saw record amounts of investment into HR technology, with companies in the space raising $2.57 billion across 90 deals in 16 countries.

HR tech startups also had a successful last quarter in 2020. Despite a global pandemic raging, high unemployment, and economic uncertainty global investors doubled down on HR technology in 2020, investing $1.28 billion in Q4 2020 across the globe.