Recruitment marketplace Remotebase, which is today announcing a $2.1 million capital raise to expand its market reach, is very much a business born of the Covid-19 pandemic. Founders Qasim Salam and Talha Masood turned adversity into opportunity when the crisis forced them to shutter two start-ups they had launched from their native Pakistan to serve US clients.
“We faced a real crisis, but the last thing we wanted to do was lay off talented staff in the middle of the pandemic, because they all had families who were financially dependent on them,” Salam recalls. “We started frantically emailing all our contacts in Silicon Valley to see if anyone needed a software engineer and whether our developers might be a good match.”
What Salam and Masood had not appreciated was that the pandemic would send demand for remote working engineers into a boom – particularly for the high-quality engineers they employed. The penny dropped quickly. “We realised that we needed to pivot our businesses towards recruitment.”
That’s exactly what Remotebase has done over the past two years. It now has around 60,000 software engineers on its books. Each one is vetted carefully so that the company understands their skills and specialties; new joiners go through a series of tests, trials and interviews before they are added to the database.
The result is that Remotebase is able to offer its clients access to a much more carefully curated group of software engineers than other recruitment networks, where people tend to self-certify the skills. As requests come in from clients – mostly fast-growing Californian technology companies – they identify the perfect candidate for the role.
It’s high-value work – so far, the company has placed around 100 engineers in prestige jobs, earning valuable commissions in the process. Now, however, the founders see the potential to extend their market reach with the launch of a new service, Talently; this is where today’s $2.1 million fund-raise will be deployed.
Talently will effectively operate as a halfway house between more traditional networks and Remotebase’s model. To get on to Talently, engineers will still need to go through the company’s vetting process – ensuring the advantages of the curated model are retained – but recruiters will then be able to select them directly through the platform, rather than looking to Remotebase to manage the hire.
Recruiters using Talently will pay a monthly subscription fee starting at $499 to access the service, rather than paying commissions to Remotebase. “That should help us broaden our market,” Salam explains. “We’ll be able to serve a wider range of recruiters and ensure engineers have access to a larger number of opportunities.”
Remotebase founders Qasim Salam and Talha Masood
Today’s fundraising is co-led by Indus Valley Capital and Hustlefund Ventures, with participation from Soma Capital, Angel Squad, Draper Associates, and Angel investors from Redis and Careem. The $2.1 million raised values the business at around $65 million.
Remotebase’s investors are excited by the potential for a business that can help plug the global shortage of talented developers – shortages of engineers are expected to reach 4 million worldwide by 2025 according to market researcher IDC. Inevitably, that means recruiters often make slow progress when hiring; the average developer hire takes 42 days to complete according to Workable. By contrast, Remotebase and Talently say their developers are ready to deploy within 24 hours.
Meanwhile, Salam is also focused on the bigger picture. “Every one of the engineers on our platform lives in an emerging economy,” he says of the business’s network, which includes developers from Pakistan, Nigeria, India and Eastern Europe. “If we can get these talented individuals into top jobs at leading Silicon Valley companies, the future is bright.”
Indeed, Salam believes Remotebase and Talently can play a crucial role in driving economic growth in Pakistan, which has seen the technology sector in next-door neighbour India accelerate exponentially over the past couple of decades.
