PH start-up makes it to elite roster of Silicon Valley babies

Manila, Philippines—Kalibrr, a Philippine tech start-up, recently joined the ranks of successful companies like AirBnB, Reddit, Dropbox, Scribd and 9-gag, which were initially funded by Silicon Valley venture firm, Y-Combinator. Headed by University of California-Berkeley alumni, Paul Rivera and Dexter Ligot-Gordon, Kalibrr is a cloud-based job-matching platform, which makes online recruitment not only faster and smarter, but also more reliable.

Kalibrr generated a whopping $2 million, the largest fund raised by a local start-up so far. This was made possible by a number of investors, 75% of which are foreign-based including Pierre Omidyar of eBay and Y Combinator, and 25% from PH-based Kickstart Ventures.

“We are proud to be the first Filipino company to receive support from the Valley, but we certainly hope that we are not the last,” says Rivera, Kalibrr founder.

The firm started local operations in the fourth quarter of 2014 and their platform is currently on beta, but the founders recently disclosed their plan of going full swing by the second quarter of this year. 

“We are almost done getting initial feedback from our clients and from the jobseekers using Kalibrr. After that, we will be able to add more features to the site. Thanks to the seed fund, we were able to grow the team with just me and Dexter to about 32 people, handling front- and back-end, content, and sales.” adds Rivera.

Six months after going online and Kalibrr has already provided 1,000 jobs to individuals and has gained the trust of over 2,300 companies, including key players in the telecommunications, real estate, finance, and services sectors.

“Kalibrr’s vision is simple—Evolution and revolution of recruitment. We want to remove the notion of job search. It’s now job match. We want to create an ideal experience for both the job seeker, and company to be able to connect and match with each other. We’re truly innovating in our space and I think we can be very proud to say that we are bringing this technology not only in Manila, but to Cebu, Davao, the entire Philippines, and soon, the rest of the world, ” shares Dexter Ligot-Gordon, co-founder.  

“I think people will be inspired and they will realize that we can really build a valuable technology and start an organization in the Philippines. This will be a testament where the country is at this point of time, relative to the rest of the world.  The Philippines is now back in a global economic stage. We are no longer the sick man of Asia. We’re probably the healthiest man in Asia right now,” concludes Rivera.