Fika Jobs, a Stockholm-based startup, is building a video-first hiring platform that uses AI agents to interview candidates. The company announced a $4 million pre-seed round to continue developing the platform, grow its team, and prepare for a wider launch later this year. The platform aims to replace traditional resume-based hiring with a more dynamic approach that highlights personality and communication skills through short-form video profiles. Candidates connect their LinkedIn profiles, and Fika’s AI generates personalized interview questions. The AI agent, currently powered by Google’s Gemini models, conducts a 10-minute video interview. After the interview, Fika automatically turns responses into short video clips and organizes them into a profile. Employers can then discover and revisit these profiles as new opportunities arise. This approach allows candidates to maintain a live profile that employers can access, rather than applying to every new role. The platform is free for job seekers, and employers pay 10% of a candidate’s first-year salary upon a successful hire. This is lower than the 20% to 30% fees often charged by traditional recruiters and headhunters. Fika currently has a small team but expects to reach around 10 employees by the end of the year. More than 100 companies are on the waitlist, though the founders declined to disclose which ones. Separately, they said more than 50 companies have tested the platform, including Plenty Labs, SICS.ai, Kognity, and Rebtel. The platform plans to open early access to candidates this week, with a broader public launch expected this fall. The company will initially focus on Sweden before expanding internationally. The round was led by Luminar Ventures, with participation from Alliance VC and King co-founders Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi.
Fika Jobs’ founders, co-founders and brothers Jakob Dubois (CEO) and Alexander Dubois (CTO), were inspired by their previous startup, Gaff. They spent a lot of time recruiting and almost passed on a candidate because his resume did not stand out. However, they ended up speaking with him anyway, and within minutes, his grit, drive, and ambition became obvious. This experience convinced the founders that some traits employers care about most are difficult to capture on paper. Unlike most competitors that focus on helping employers source, screen, and match candidates more efficiently with AI, Fika is building a platform where candidates maintain video-first profiles and employers browse a pool of people who have already been interviewed and evaluated by AI.
The platform aims to help employers assess communication skills and cultural fit early in the hiring process, complementing traditional resume and application reviews. This approach may be especially valuable for early-career professionals and candidates from non-traditional backgrounds, whose potential is not always apparent from a resume alone. However, video profiles introduce real bias risks that are also worth acknowledging. When employers can see a candidate’s race, age, gender, physical appearance, and accent before evaluating their qualifications, it opens the door to discrimination that a resume, for all its flaws, at least partially obscures. There’s a reason some companies have moved toward blind resume screening.
Source: techcrunch
