Investors make a beeline for startup firm
Kalibrr, a Filipino Internet startup, secured investments of up to $1.9 million to bolster its efficiency in recruiting workers for the booming business process outsourcing (BPO) industry.
The company, whose investors include a unit of Globe Telecom, is still in the so-called beta stage and is in talks with various BPO companies ahead of its commercial launch next year, Kalibrr CEO Paul Rivera said during a briefing on Wednesday.
The plan is to make Kalibrr one of the fastest growing cloud-based software companies in the Philippines in terms of revenue, said Rivera, who left his job at Google Inc. in 2007 to become an entrepreneur.
Given its internal growth projections, the company may be ready for an initial public offering in two years, he added.
“We are going to use the funds to transform recruitment for the BPO industry, which will soon comprise the largest component of the country’s GDP (gross domestic product),” Rivera said.
The company’s main product is a platform that would allow BPO companies to assess applicants via their skills—determined through an online assessment—instead of traditional and sometimes inefficient metrics like the school a person went to or their academic standing.
“We want to make the résumé obsolete,” he said, explaining that the company aims to showcase the workers’ skills.
Kalibrr earns through regular subscription payments from BPO companies that use its software. He declined to give details on price as the company has yet to launch commercially.
Globe’s investment, while lumped together with other investors, was made through Kickstart Ventures, its accelerator-incubator company.
This was one of several investments in tech startups that Kickstart has made, its president Minette Navarette said Wednesday.
The fund has allotted an initial $2.5 million, more than half of which has already been deployed since the fund was launched last year, she said.
The company’s other investors include Omidyar Network, Siemer Ventures and Learn Capital.
