Workfully Aims to Revolutionize Recruitment with $1.27M Seed Funding Led by Indico Capital

Indico has announced today it has led Workfully’s $1.27 million (€1.2 million) seed round. Workfully is on a mission to create the most trusted recruitment experience in the world, becoming the creator platform for a new recruiting economy. The decentralized recruitment and upskilling marketplace allows companies to hire and upskill talent from entry-level to the most specialized executive roles globally. Indico leads a group of investors in this seed round that includes Pitchdrive and Secways Ventures, among others.

Founded in 2021, Workfully grew organically during 2022, signing significant deals with enterprises and VC-backed unicorns the likes of FreeNow, TravelPerk, Blackberry, Lamborghini, and Accenture, among others, allowing them to scale their recruitment operations globally.

“The recruitment agency model has been around since the Roman Empire,” says Valerio Rossi, Workfully’s Co-Founder and CEO. “Countless startups tried to disrupt the $700bn recruiting service market with little success, as Talent Marketplaces usually try to cut the middleman – the recruiter – connecting a specific talent pool, say software engineers, directly to employers. The problem with that model is that it is highly transactional and typically converts the platform into a database of dead CVs. Workfully is trying a radically different approach. In fact Workfully doesn’t cut recruiters out. It is built around the recruiter instead, allowing them to independently grow, engage, and monetize vertical talent pools, launching their digital recruiting agencies through our technology, without the hassle of finding clients, paying for LinkedIn, or doing marketing by themselves in a fiercely competitive landscape. We believe that building a recruiting business in the future will look much more like being a content creator: starting off on a platform like Workfully, building an audience, and then monetizing that audience in-platform.”

The current year has been challenging for startups. With companies cutting costs and focusing on operational efficiency, there have been countless tech layoffs and shrinking hiring budgets across the board. In this context, Workfully’s organic growth and successful funding round confirm that there’s a strong appetite from enterprises to de-risk their recruitment operations, hire globally, and upgrade their recruiting providers from analogical agencies to modern digital solutions. 

According to McKinsey, the global talent pool will continue to shrink, generating an estimated 8.5 trillion dollars of unrealized revenue by 2030. As work becomes increasingly specialized and there is a shortage of talent, hybrid human-digital recruitment tools will become even more important in helping people change careers, particularly with artificial intelligence support, something which is part of the Workfully product development roadmap.

The company aims not only to empower recruiters to place senior candidates into enterprise companies but, in some cases, to “give high potential candidates with no technical skills the training needed to access higher-paying positions,” says Stefano Tacconi, the CCO & Co-founder who left his job at Google to start Workfully. “We are seeing more and more enterprises turning into hybrid recruitment & training solutions to quickly hire and upskill junior individuals instead of overpaying for hard-to-find talent on the market. We believe that recruitment and training will become increasingly intertwined in the coming years.”

Companies have hired for hundreds of key senior roles through Workfully, including about 100 candidates from underrepresented groups who were upskilled for the purpose of joining well-known tech companies. Workfully’s mission is to build the most trusted recruiting experience in the world, allowing enterprises to easily hire and upskill talent globally through a network of recruitment businesses that operate on its platform. 

Stephan Morais, Managing General Partner of Indico Capital, stated: “The talent war is here to stay and so are valuable specialised human recruiters that need the tools and software to support increasingly demanding global clients. Workfully brings a fresh perspective into solving a problem that is only getting bigger and harder. We are happy to support yet another Iberian startup with global ambitions from day one.”

Workfully’s most recent fundraise will allow them to continue product development and fuel the company’s growth plans, ultimately empowering more recruiters around the world to work for themselves with true flexibility while better serving the job market.