The Estonian borderless living technology platform, Jobbatical, has raised €11.6 million in a funding round; the investment supports the company’s global expansion.
The investment round was led by Nordic VC Inventure; additional investors included Union Square Ventures, Swiss Post Ventures, Karma VC, Metaplanet, Devotion Ventures, and angel investors Kristel Kruustük, Indrek Prants, Andres Kull, and the former head of Airbnb experiences, Joe Zadeh, the company announced.
“Jobbatical manages employee relocations for high-growth companies including N26, TravelPerk and Personio to build a world where moving from one country to another is fully paperless,” the company said in a statement.
“Roughly one in 30 people make a move internationally every year, with two-thirds choosing to land in Europe and the US. Post-COVID, the growth curve for worker relocations has rapidly increased as businesses look to relocate talent to plug gaps created by the global skills shortage.”
Managing relocation across 21 countries
In 2019, four years after it was founded by Estonian entrepreneurs and siblings Karoli and Ronald Hindriks, Jobbatical saw the opportunity to pivot its business model away from recruitment, toward streamlining employee relocation and immigration processes. In 2014, when the company was founded, it was primarily a cross-border recruitment platform.
With the product leadership of co-founder Ankur Agarwal, the company executed the change and “today it is managing employee relocation across twenty-one countries for leading tech companies across Europe such as fintech giant N26, and people operations technology giant Personio to name a few.”
“The lockdowns following the pandemic should have slowed us down but didn’t – that’s proof that Jobbatical helps companies battle the largest ever global skills shortage as borderless living becomes the norm,” Karoli Hindriks, a co-founder and the CEO of the company, said.
