Job Search Platform Atma Debuts Soon, Pockets Initial Funding Of 73 Billion Rupiah

Job search platform Atma pocketed pre-seed funding of $5 million or around 73 billion Rupiah. This funding was led by AC Ventures and supported by Global Founders Capital (GFC).

In addition, a number of founders participated as strategic angel investors, including from GoTo Group, Advance Intelligence Group, Ula, Lummo, Kopi Kenangan, Sampoerna Strategic, MMS Group, and Xiaomi.

For information, Atma was founded in 2022 by a number of former high-ranking technology companies, namely Edy Tan (former Chief of Driver Gojek), Chris Gunawan (former Co-founder RestoDepot and Product Executive Vara).

Susan Suhargo (former Strategic Initiatives Tencent and Regional Marketing Gojek ), Tim Young (former Atlas Asset Management investor and HSBC Fixed Income Trader), and Monica Oudang (Chairman of YABB-GoTo Foundation and former CHRO Gojek who served as advisor) are also the founders.

Atma is a community-based job search platform that targets middle to lower-income job seekers (less than IDR 10 million per month), especially the productive age segment in Indonesia.

Atma strives to build an end-to-end ecosystem that includes a job market, skills development agency, and a community-based support system. Currently, the Atma service has not been released to the public. Although on the official website they have already recruited potential users in the early stages.

Inspired By the Experience of Working with Drivers

Atma Co-founder & CEO Edy Tan admitted that he was inspired to establish this new startup from his experience working as a Gojek executive who handles the driver community.

He saw the social impact of Gojek‘s service which was able to create jobs in the informal sector to 2.5 million drivers in Indonesia. With a similar mission, Edy wants to reach a wider population and include the formal sector.

To that end, this funding will be used to support the development of product and service quality, implement a go-to-market strategy, and expand the number of their team by the end of this year.

Meanwhile, AC Ventures Founder and Managing Partner Michael Soerijadji revealed that there are more than 100 million active workers with lower middle income who face significant inefficiency in finding the right job according to their skills and preferences.

“Atma can help employers select applicants with more relevant qualifications and provide career development opportunities through additional certification or training. Atma will redefine the job search experience,” said Michael.

Apart from Atma, currently there are a number of other job marketplace platforms that are also operating. One of them is Lumina, which just received initial funding from Y Combinator and Alpha JWC Ventures in early January 2022. Besides that, there is also Side, MyRobin, Glints, and so on.

The Inefficiency of the Job Search Process

Furthermore, Edy assessed that there are a number of problems that are often experienced by job seekers in the lower middle-income segment. In fact, digitalization has developed massively in Indonesia.

In recruitment activities, for example, there are significant inefficiencies where the process takes a long time, starting from job openings, candidate selection, interviews, to candidate acceptance. This situation often makes prospective workers feel neglected for a long time.

He even assessed that the emergence of the internet has not been able to present innovations that can be a comprehensive solution to this problem.

“Job seekers in this segment describe the experience of looking for work as something that brings emotional trauma. While companies describe the experience of looking for candidates as a random walk process,” he said.

From this pain point, Atma wants to present a large-scale product solution to redefine the job search process. Atma builds products to transform the overall seeker and employer experience using core elements based on convenience, interactivity, sociability, personalization and gamification.

“We are entering the era of community-based technology where everything we do is influenced by individuals or groups of people. Community provides identity, a sense of belonging, connection, support and growth for job seekers,” concluded Edy.