Early Game Ventures announces a new seed investment in YOX, which promises to revolutionize the blue-collar job market with the help of AI. The €1.5 million round will allow the startup to expand internationally.
Frontline Hiring in Future:
Finding a job has not really changed since the era when you had to use a pen to circle some job ads in the local newspaper. The Internet only removed the pen and replaced the paper with a screen. People apply randomly to job posts and employers receive hundreds of unqualified candidates. At the same time AI will reshape work for 174 million people in the next 5 years .
Sectors like hospitality and leisure will continue to rely on human experience, with a majority of tasks expected to remain human-delivered – driving long-term need for real-time talent matching.
“There’s a phenomenon in frontline hiring: people are frustrated that there are no jobs because nobody contacts them, and employers complain there are no people. But the real problem isn’t lack of people – it’s that neither side has perfect information”, said Martin Dimitrov, Co-founder and CEO of Yox. “Our ambition is to be the vaccine – solving the structural inefficiencies in the hiring market, not just optimizing around them”.
People-First Managed Marketplace
According to data provided by Yox, frontline jobs account for over 60% of the global workforce and around 40 million hires per year only in the UK and USA, with an average of 1 person changing jobs 3–4 times per year.
The company believes that most hiring tools are built around the problem or focus on just one part of the hiring process.
Yox is turning a chaotic labor market into structured, intelligent infrastructure by creating a fully managed marketplace. Candidates just signal that they need a job and in the next 24 hours they are guaranteed interviews. The platform is people first and doesn’t stop guiding people until they are hired.
With extensive background in large government infrastructures and map-based technologies, the team built a comprehensive geo-located infrastructure that factors in over 200 criteria like location, transport, salaries, shifts, working hours to guide candidates through a simple voice conversation.
“Yox attracts thousands of registered people per week ready to start working now and because we achieved almost perfect candidate qualification, we managed to successfully implement for the first time a pay-per-candidate pricing – a fair model where employers pay only for qualified candidates ready to start working now”, said Lilyana Dimitrova, Co-founder and Chief Sales officer of Yox.
The Early Game philosophy
The Early Game philosophy is not based on trends, but on real companies, solving real problems in large markets. And the frontline workforce is a market of over $100 billion, with increasingly acute problems as the economy shrinks, migration patterns change, and Gen Z enters the labor market with different expectations.
“YOX caught our attention from the very beginning. Not because they were the only ones trying to solve the systemic problem of the blue-collar labor market. We’ve seen other startups try. But because their solution was finally the right one. Think about what it means for a company with 300 stores or 150 logistics centers to cover a shift tomorrow morning at 7. They don’t need to hire “at some point,” they need to hire now. And YOX solves this problem with its AI-based technology. Such a competitive advantage – simple, clear and deeply needed – is exactly what we, as investors, are looking for,” explains Cristian Munteanu, Managing Partner of EGV.
The DLA Piper Romania team (Cristina Bucur, Bogdan Buta), provided legal assistance and professionally coordinated the international team involved in the deal, which included DLA Piper Palo Alto and the legal team of YOX.
