From Brazil to a US HRTech Success Story: Talentify: Othamar Filho (Part 1)

Brazilian entrepreneur Othamar Filho identified an HRTech problem to solve while building a business in Brazil.

Read how he navigated his way to building a successful company in the US.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where are you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Othamar Filho: I was born in the northeast of Brazil in a beach town. I started school there and then I moved to Miami. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. My father had been an entrepreneur. I met someone while at the University of Miami who wanted to start an e-commerce in Brazil. I went back to Brazil.

From 2006 to 2016, I tried many different things in Brazil. The last one before I moved here was a recruitment outsourcing company that helped large companies in Brazil hire people at scale around the country. From that, I was able to identify our biggest hurdles to growth and created a platform from that.

I was following someone in the HR tech space. He’s Rudy Karsan. He’s the founder of Kenexa. I reached out to him after he left IBM. He established his own family office fund. I said, “We are developing this recruitment automation platform. I’d love to hear your thoughts about it.” He replied, “Sure, do you want to do a Skype?” I didn’t want to pressure him that I’d be flying to the US just to meet him, so I said, “I’ll be on vacation in New York a few weeks from now. Why don’t we meet in person then?”

It was supposed to be a 30-minute call but ended up being a three-hour meeting. He said some encouraging words. He said, “The product looks interesting, but you don’t have a company here in the US. I’ll be your mentor. I’ll talk to you and help you. If you show some traction, I might be interested.”

It was enough to get my wife and me to go there. I got here and established a company by myself. We had a small team in Brazil that stayed in Brazil. I set up an office here and bootstrapped our way. Almost a year after I landed here, I was able to connect with someone from a very large recruitment process company in the world called Cielo. That was in 2016.

We started negotiations and talked to them. They saw our platform as a way to launch a new service. It was a high-volume recruitment process outsourcing for companies hiring hourly workers in the US. They chose us to be the engine that they could run that service on.

Sramana Mitra: What was unique about your product?

Othamar Filho: At that time, you had the applicant tracking system (ATS). It was mostly a compliance and data repository platform. Then you had to go manually post jobs on Indeed. You had to Frankenstein your way into a solution that would help you at scale. We put everything in one solution.

On our platform, you could advertise the job, and get the candidates to self-screen. If they pass, they could be invited to schedule like Calendly. You could also get visibility around everything that’s happening. After one year of struggling, we got that. Rudy saw the traction. In early 2017, we were able to raise our only round. We didn’t need anything else after that. That was $1.2 million from Cielo and $250,000 from Rudy.

This segment is part 1 in the series : From Brazil to a US HRTech Success Story: Talentify: Othamar Filho
1 2 3