The Independent Investor
July 7, 2023
NodeFlair, a Singapore-based career advancement platform for tech talents, recently announced raising $2m in Series A funding that will enable the firm to grow the team, accelerate product development, and fuel expansion into Southeast Asia, including the Philippines.
“The Philippines will be part of the SEA expansion plan. In fact, users can already browse Philippines jobs and salaries at this moment,” Adrian Goh Jun Wei, NodeFlair co-founder, told The Independent Investor in an online interaction.
The round was anchored by venture investor Iterative, with 500 Global and PERSOL VENTURE PARTNERS, the corporate venture capital arm of human resource management group PERSOL, participating. Other investors that participated in the funding round were Siu Rui Quek (CEO and Co-Founder of Carousell), JJ Chai (CEO and Co-Founder of Rainforest), and Kum Hong Siew (Former Chief Operating Officer of AirBnB China).
Founded in 2018 by Adrian Goh Jun Wei and Ethan Ang, NodeFlair offers job listings, payslip-verified salary data, detailed career information, and reviews of company recruiters in its platform. The startup aims to be profitable by 2024.
The platform empowers global tech talents to make smarter career decisions, and enables international employers to hire the right people faster by connecting them with highly qualified professionals across Asia. NodeFlair currently supports companies of any scale, from startups to businesses like ByteDance, Dyson, Shopee, and more.
As a trusted resource for tech talent in Asia, NodeFlair publishes its annual Tech Salary Report. The 2023 report, which includes analysis based on over 170,000 salary data points, received over 5,500 downloads, and was referenced by more than 50 publications in the first half of 2023.
“NodeFlair is transforming tech recruitment by bringing greater transparency and equality,” according to Hsu Ken Ooi, Managing Partner & Co-founder of Iterative. “Their role is essential in building towards a sustainable and impactful tech ecosystem that supports economic and societal development, and I’m proud to be part of NodeFlair’s journey.”
Shingo Ishida, Partner and Head of APAC at Persol Venture Partners added: “The team at NodeFlair is building an innovative and valuable resource for talent recruitment. By combining NodeFlair’s data-driven platform with PERSOL’s expertise in talent acquisition, I’m confident our partnership will accelerate the growth of Asia’s tech industries.”
Based on the Gobi-Core State of Talent in Tech 2022 report that examines the current state of the Philippine tech ecosystem alongside the challenges and opportunities it is set to face in the future, tech talent has become increasingly sought-after in the Philippines with more entrepreneurs building tech and tech-enabled businesses. A key area to address, according to the report, is the country’s ability to meet the demand with the supply, considering that the number of tech and engineering graduates in the Philippines has remained stagnant from 2016 to 2019, exacerbated by the school closures and interruptions during the pandemic in 2020-2021.
