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

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

In addition, a number of founders participated as angel investors strategic, 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 RestoDepot Co-founder and Product Executive Vara), Susan Suhargo (former Tencent Strategic Initiatives and Regional Marketing Gojek), Tim Young (former Atlas Asset Management investor and HSBC Fixed Income Trader), and Monica Oudang (Chair of the YABB-GoTo Foundation and ex CHRO Gojek serving as adviser).

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 seeks to build ecosystems end-to-end which includes the job market, skills development agencies, and community-based support systems.

Currently the Atma service has not been released to the public. Despite on the official site they have already recruited potential early stage users.

Inspired by the experience of working together driver

Co-founder & CEO Atma Edy Tan said he was inspired to establish this new startup from his experience working as an executive Gojek managing the community driver. He sees the social impact of services Gojek which is able to create jobs in the informal sector to 2,5 million driver in Indonesia.

With a similar mission, Edy wants to reach a wider population and include the formal sector. For this reason, this funding will be used to support the development of product and service quality, implementing strategies to market , and expand their team numbers until 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 who just received initial funding from Y Combinator and Alpha JWC Ventures in early January 2022. Besides that, there are also Sides, 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.

In fact, he considered the emergence of the internet even though it has not been able to bring 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 employers describe the experience of looking for candidates as a process random walk," he said.  

From point bread With this, 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, sense of belonging, connection, support and growth for job seekers," concluded Edy.