Deal focus: Remote working delivers for Glints

Talent-as-a-service wasn’t part of the business plan when Southeast Asia-focused recruitment platform Glints was established in 2013, but thanks to a pandemic-driven surge in remote working, it now accounts for 70% of the company’s revenue. Moreover, the revenue profile is highly desirable: employers pay an upfront fee for recruitment and ongoing monthly subscription for management.

“It’s a high-margin business and it’s recurring revenue – and it has grown 5x through the COVID period,” said Oswald Yeo (pictured), co-founder and CEO of Glints, which recently closed a USD 50m Series D round led by DCM Ventures, Lavender Hill Capital, and Persol Holdings. “It also allows us to act for customers from all over the world that want to hire people in Southeast Asia.”

Talent-as-a-service, or remote talent management, combines the start-up’s core employee search function – it claims a network of more than 3m individuals across Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan – with a local management operation.

Not only are companies looking to hire in far-flung markets, but they also want help onboarding and paying these recruits. A Singapore employer that has no legal entity or local human resources infrastructure in Vietnam outsources payroll, social security, and other functions to Glints. It could hire across multiple markets and just deal with a Singapore or Hong Kong parent entity.

Nearly half of the Glints’ employer customers are in the technology sector, with the rest coming from more traditional industries like banking and finance. However, it is perhaps more instructive to categorise by role rather than company type. Most of the positions that banks want to fill are technology-related, as they attempt to pre-empt disruption by recruiting top engineers.

Yeo was surprised by how readily financial services companies were willing to follow the technology sector’s lead and embrace remote working. “Insurers and banks are being forced to digitise, so they want to build up tech teams quickly. With top talent more likely to apply to Facebook or Google, they must go into markets like Vietnam and Indonesia,” he said. “That’s where we see big demand.”

Yeo established Glints as a side project when on national service duty in Singapore. He and his co-founders dropped out of university in 2015 to launch what was then a mobile-first platform focused on graduate jobs and internships. Targeting cross-border recruitment was a quickly recognised and necessary expansion opportunity – Singapore didn’t offer enough employment liquidity.

“Entering Indonesia in 2018 was when the business started to take off. There was demand for technology talent in Singapore, but not enough supply. Indonesia, meanwhile, had so much raw potential,” Yeo said. “We began matching up Singapore employers with in-Asia talent, and that’s how the remote hiring business came about. It took off again with COVID and remote working.”

Part of the Series D proceeds will be used to support expansion into the Philippines. Glints doesn’t go in with a full-stack solution, rather relying on existing demand – from Singapore employers, for example – to cultivate the supply side. This has become easier with each new market, said Yeo, noting that growing to a certain scale took half as much time in Vietnam as Indonesia.

Vietnam and Indonesia are already generating net profit on a single-country basis. Glints isn’t profitable at the group level because of investment in new markets, but it claims positive contribution margins across all business units, ranging from recruitment to remote talent management to career development training. Overall revenue has grown 2-3x every year since 2018.

The company has now raised more than USD 80m to date and boasts an investor base that includes Monk’s Hill Ventures, Fresco Capital, MindWorks Capital, and Wavemaker Partners, as well as Endeavour Catalyst, an investment firm chaired by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

Persol, a listed Japanese HR business with a presence in Southeast Asia, led the Series C in 2021, and DCM and Lavender Hill were deliberately chosen to join it as co-leads for the Series D. Lavender Hill is led by Xiaoyin Zhang, who previously took a host of Chinese tech companies public as a banker at Goldman Sachs, while DCM was an early backer of recruitment start-ups like Zhaopin and 51job.

“Southeast Asia is a few years behind China in terms of tech ecosystem,” said Yeo. “There’s a lot of knowledge we can get from the first wave of internet in China.”

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Expansion
• Technology
• Singapore
• Growth capital
• TMT
• DCM-Doll Capital Management
• Lavender Hill Capital