PH startup backed by Silicon Valley firm

MANILA, Philippines–Philippine tech startup Kalibrr has joined the elite roster of companies that will be initially funded by Silicon Valley venture firm Y-Combinator.

In a statement, Kalibrr said it secured $2 million, which it claimed to be the largest fund raised by a local startup so far.

About 75 percent of the amount was pooled by foreign based investors that included Y-Combinator and Pierre Omidyar of eBay.

The remaining 25 percent of the proceeds was provided by Philippine-based Kickstart Ventures.

Founded by Paul Rivera and Dexter Ligot-Gordon, Kalibrr is a cloud-based job-matching platform, which makes online recruitment not only faster and smarter, but also more reliable.

Kalibrr started local operations in the fourth quarter of 2014.

Over the past six months, the company has already provided 1,000 jobs to seekers, and has gained the trust of over 2,300 companies, including key players in the telecommunications, real estate, finance, and services sectors.

The founders expect their operations to be on full swing by the second quarter of this year.

“We are almost done getting initial feedback from our clients and from the jobseekers using Kalibrr. After that, we will be able to add more features to the site. Thanks to the seed fund, we were able to grow the team with just me and Dexter to about 32 people, handling front- and back-end, content and sales,” Rivera noted.

“Kalibrr’s vision is simple—Evolution and revolution of recruitment. We want to remove the notion of job search. It’s now job match. We want to create an ideal experience for both the job seeker, and company to be able to connect and match with each other. We’re truly innovating in our space and I think we can be very proud to say that we are bringing this technology, not only in Manila, but to Cebu, Davao, the entire Philippines, and soon, the rest of the world,” added Ligot-Gordon.