Human resource information system (HRIS) Talenta has raised undisclosed amount of seed funding led by East Ventures and backed by Mayapada Group’s Grace Tahir as angel investor. Founded by Joshua Kevin, Talenta aims to create a SaaS product focusing on human resource management. With this funding, Talenta will grow the team and fully launch the product by the end of the year.
Talenta believes there’s space for new product in HR management, especially in Indonesia. According to Forrester Research, HR system is valued at $10 Billion worldwide and growing at 8% annually. Indonesia has 55.2 million of small and medium businesses (SME) according to recent report by Kompas and the SME employed the majority out of 118.17 million people of the productive age. HR management system is also one of the main area that being procured by companies in Indonesia with over $400 million in value.
Previously founded Bridge Inc [link in Indonesian], Kevin and his team are now focusing their energy and efforts for Talenta. As Kevin said to DailySocial, “Bridge Inc was originally founded as a boutique agency providing consultancy services to startups in Indonesia market. Most of our clients ended up being foreign startups instead of my original vision of helping local startups. After several months we realized that although the money is good, it’s not going to scale (its service) and I realize I don’t want to only get money and not actually solving a problem at scale. So I realized that in Indonesia, recruitment specifically and HR generally still has a huge problem. We believe there is still opportunity and we focuses on chasing this idea.”
Kevin then pitched to several angels and Grace Tahir is the one ended up believing in their vision and helped them. Tahir told in press release, “I think that Joshua is creating a product that is solving a real problem instead of doing another social network or photo application. I see myself and the Mayapada Group using this solution and I believe with Joshua’s experience and network he will build a lasting company.”
Kevin added, “With that (seed funding) money, we ended up creating two products, we have soft-launched Internat.co and we are still developing Talenta. East Ventures, especially Willson, helps us to re-focus and choose one product that I also personally think can be much bigger than the other, so we decided to go all-in with Talenta, which is a SaaS for Human Resource Management.”
About Talenta itself, Kevin confirms that it looks more and less like the infamous Taleo, but Taleo itself is suitable for huge corporations with thousands of employees. Talenta, in contrary, is the only player in the HR SaaS that is made here in Indonesia, claimed Kevin, and focus on SME consumers.
About Talenta’s local knowledge, he stated, “We believe we have that edge of relating to local cultures, laws, and taxes especially when you talk about payroll. Our key target market is also quite different, at least at this stage, we are focusing on SMEs which employs most of our people in the productive age. A lot of companies at their early stage or on SME ‘phase’ use spreadsheet as their way to manage their HR and we believe that we can provide a much more scalable solution to spreadsheet.”
“Thus when they have less than 10-15 people, it is free but when they have a larger team, we will start charging, at that point we believe that (and this also from the conclusion from our conversations with HR Managers) they will keep using our platform hence creating a really good LTV (lifetime value) for us,” he said optimistically.
Currently with 8 employees, Talenta is still under development and expects to launch in beta phase, with several key features that hopefully actually solve problems right away, like attendance, employee database and management, and payroll, before entering final phase by the end of this year. It plans to grow the team to have 12 employees at that time and will grow faster next year.