In July of 2014 Madrid-based startup Jobandtalent raised more than $14 million from a group of selected investors, becoming one of the largest rounds in the Spanish ecosystem.
Less than a year later, the company is back at it.
Jobandtalent has just closed a €23 million round led by Pelayo Cortina Koplowitz, founder of oil company Inversiones Petroleras Iberoamericanas and member of one of the most rich families in Spain. The investment was made through Percacer, a holding company that manages more than €4 billion in assets belonging to the Koplowitz family.
Previous investors in Jobandtalent also participated in this round, including Qualitas Equity Partners, the VC firm belonging to the founders of media empire Grupo Prisa and one of the biggest shareholders in Tuenti at the time of its purchase by Telefonica, FJME (Fundación Entrecanales), Nicolás Luca de Tena (who just had a big exit with La Nevera Roja) and Kibo Ventures.
This round brings the total raised by the professional career services company to more than $40 million, becoming the most well funded company in the country that has not received capital from foreign investors.
Jobandtalent makes money in three ways: recruitment services, which include employer branding services and advanced screening methods for companies; education-related services, that help students or workers find business schools and universities that fit their profiles, and traditional advertising for small and medium sized companies.
In a recent conversation, Jobandtalent’s co-CEO Juan Urdiales told me that recruitment and education-related services are the two areas that account for the vast majority of the company’s sales. “Our objective is for each area to represent a third of all income in the near future”, he says.
Jobandtalent: matching services and data for the professional market
With more than 5 million registered users (450.000 new each month), 35.000 companies and 1.5 million job offers, Urdiales and team seem confident that they can take advantage of all the data they have to become the “best job matching company out there”.
Mexico, Spain and the UK are Jobandtalent’s main markets. The US is the company’s main goal going forward.
“We have many competitors, from traditional job boards like Monster or Infojobs to aggregators like Indeed, and, of course, LinkedIn”, he said. “We see Jobandtalent as a data company and I believe all players in the space compete against each other. What we think we can do best than most is the process of matching companies with relevant workers and/or business schools or universities”.
The 75-person company claims that it plans to allocate €10 million to R&D over the next two years, in an effort to improve its matching algorithm and to differentiate itself from competitors. 45 of Jobandtalent’s employees are engineers and data scientists.
Urdiales declined to talk much about Jobandtalent’s business.
The company had sales of almost €1 million in 2013 but hasn’t talked publicly since then about its performance. Various sources claim that the company has lost quite a bit of money over the past few quarters -one could argue that most companies do at their growth stage- and Urdiales admits that their focus is on user growth. “We’re focused on building a marketplace and to build a strong business model. We’re not currently focused on revenue, although in 2014 we doubled our sales compared to the previous year”.
“Our objective for the near future is to grow, grow and grow. By 2016 we want to have more than 20 million users”, he explains. “We think our technology is unique and we want to be as aggressive as possible”.
