Pintarnya, one-stop digital platform for blue collar workers to find employment opportunities in Indonesia, announced Tuesday it has raised $8 million from East Ventures and Vertex Ventures SEA & India (VVSEAI), bringing the total seed funding to $14.3 million.

Pintarnya Co-Founder Henry Hendrawan said in a statement that with this new funding, the group will grow its ecosystem of job seekers and employers across different cities in Indonesia.

According to him, the group will further invest in technology and data capability as its key value-add to facilitate an efficient job search process for both candidates and employers.

The company is also expanding its team and actively seeking engineers, product managers, designers, marketeers, operations and business development professionals based in Jakarta.

“Several sectors have seen exponential growth in Indonesia post-COVID, resulting in a huge opportunity for both job seekers and employers,

“We are keen to be the platform of choice that facilitates supply-demand matching for both sides and provides access to better financial services to blue collar workers through better digital identity and verifiable employment history,” he added.

Launched in May 2022, Pintarnya was founded by three senior executives Nelly Nurmalasari, Henry Hendrawan and Ghirish Pokardas. It helps Indonesia’s rising working class get employed, become more employable and access better financial services.

It is a one-stop digital platform for blue collar workers to find employment opportunities in Indonesia. The platform uses a data-driven approach to connect job seekers to employers, considering various parameters including but not limited to the job requirements, their location and their skillset.

Since its launch, Pintarnya has connected more than 6,000 employers with more than 100,000 job seekers looking for opportunities in the food and beverage (F&B), retail, logistics and hospitality sectors.

The company previously raised $6.3 million from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital India and prominent angels in May.

“There is a huge opportunity in empowering millions of the region’s blue collar workers in their quest to get better employment and livelihood. The opportunity comes with a lot of difficult pain points along the user journey but we believe Pintarnya is the right team that can crack this problem,

“They have the proven experience of building and scaling business to consumer (B2C) marketplace and financial service products in Indonesia. They are making fast progress and we are looking forward to further excitement by the team,” said Willson Cuaca, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of East Ventures who will also be joining Pintarnya as board member.

East Ventures is a pioneering and leading sector-agnostic venture capital firm headquartered in Singapore. Founded in 2009, it has transformed into a holistic platform that provides multi-stage investment, including seed and growth for over 200 companies in Southeast Asia.

“The current practices for grey collar workers to find jobs and for employers to hire the right workers in Indonesia are rather inefficient and can even be considered antiquated. Pintarnya is solving these problems using technology and data to enable significantly more efficient and cost effective job searching and hiring,

“We are excited to partner this outstanding team of Nelly, Henry and Ghirish to help the working class to find employment and access to financial services not previously available to them,” said Joo Hock Chua, Managing Partner of VVSEAI.

VVSEAI is part of the Vertex global network of venture capital funds. The fund invests in high-growth start-ups seeking their first round of institutional venture capital funding in Southeast Asia and India, with a primary focus on Singapore, India, Indonesia, Thailand and other emerging hubs of innovation across the region.

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