level: business
fika jobs, a stockholm-based startup, raised $4 million in pre-seed funding to build a video-first hiring platform. the platform combines ai interview agents with short-form video profiles, aiming to make hiring more personal and efficient. candidates connect their linkedin profile, and the ai generates personalized questions for a roughly 10-minute video interview. after the interview, responses are turned into short clips and organized into a profile that employers can browse.
the idea came from co-founders jakob and alexander dubois, who almost overlooked a strong candidate due to an unremarkable resume. they realized that traits like grit and communication skills are hard to capture on paper. unlike competitors that focus on ai-powered screening, fika lets candidates maintain live video profiles, and employers discover people who have already been interviewed by ai. the platform is free for job seekers, while employers pay 10% of a candidate's first-year salary upon a successful hire.
the platform plans to open early access this week, with a broader launch in sweden this fall and international expansion later. over 100 companies are on the waitlist, and more than 50 have tested it, including plenty labs and rebtel. the round was led by luminar ventures, with participation from alliance vc and candy crush co-founders. while video profiles can reveal communication skills, they also introduce bias risks by exposing race, age, and appearance, which traditional blind screening avoids.
why it matters: ai-driven video interviews could help surface candidates with strong soft skills who might be overlooked by resume-only screening, but they also raise fairness concerns for data science hiring.