JobHopin should be a Bunny, not Vietnam’s second unicorn, CEO Kevin said

The Vietnamese startup, that wants to make recruitment in Asia easier by using artificial intelligence has closed a $2.45 million Series A, bringing its total raised so far to more than $3 million.

The investors include SEMA Translink, KK Fund, Mynavi Corporation, Edulab Capital Partners, NKC Asia and Canaan Capital.

There are a lot of people want to invest in the company, but Kevin said that fundraising is just a beginning for him while other startups talk about funding as a milestone to celebrate.

“You raise so much compared to what? Compared to our competitors? We raised too little. As you look into our competitors which are quite similar to us on the market, they raised five to six times more than us”, Kevin said, adding his friends told him that his startup has a long list of potential investors everywhere.

He recalled his fundraising events in Korea’s Seoul and Tokyo, several investors asked for his bank account number to transfer money just half an hour of talk. He said he wanted to raise just a couple million US dollars, but the potential investors wanted to give ten times more than that to help him moving things faster.

But Kevin never considers capital is a solution.

For him, building, solving problems with the right people that believe in his company’s mission, thinking this is a huge opportunity in their lives is significant.

“When we raise fund I work really hard to find the right investor that really understand what we are going to do because startup is never a rosy picture. It is tough and hard itself. The chance that you are going to fail, especially in the technology sector like this, is extremely high. No matter you raise a couple million or a hundred million, he told Vietnam Business Review.

The tech CEO said he never wants Jobhopin to become the second unicorn of Vietnam. He wants his startup to be a Bunny that can solve, bring the best opportunity to Vietnam and Asia or help Vietnamese and Southeast Asian talents to raise skills.

Founded in 2017, CEO Kevin Tung Nguyen’s JobHopin platform, called Bunny, uses machine learning to pair candidates with jobs.

There are about 60 million knowledge economy workers in Southeast Asia, and about 108 million job placements a year, but many positions take more than a month to fill on average because many companies still do pre-screening work manually, the company said.

Kevin sees the potential of solving the recruitment problem in Southeast Asia and Vietnam, where the rate of a job quit by up to 30%.

Last year, JobHopin also had a database of more than 1.4 million job candidates derived from online databases and 2,000 enterprise clients in Vietnam.

In 2020, he expects the platform could connect 3,000 businesses, two million talent jobs, which he said: “wildly success”. In 2021, JobHopin is expected to triple the number of connected businesses in 2020 to 9,000 and 5 million job candidates.

► JobHopin, Vietnamese startup that wants to make job hunting easier, raises $2.45 million