Fika Jobs is a Stockholm startup that runs AI-led video interviews and turns them into searchable candidate profiles for employers. The company has raised a $4 million pre-seed round as it tries to fix a hiring process that still burns tons of time on resumes, cover letters, and screening steps that often tell you very little about the actual person. Founded in 2025 by brothers Jakob Dubois and Alexander Dubois, Fika Jobs is pitching a different starting point: talk first, paperwork second.
The timing makes sense. Hiring teams are drowning in applications, and candidates are increasingly dealing with AI filters before a human ever sees them. Fika’s bet is that the next hiring platform won’t just parse CVs faster. It’ll capture communication, judgment, and motivation in a format recruiters can scan quickly. That’s a sharp thesis. It also comes with real risk, especially when video makes bias easier, not harder.
What is Fika Jobs and how does it work?
Fika Jobs starts with a candidate linking a LinkedIn profile, after which the platform generates a personalized AI interview and records a roughly 10-minute to 20-minute video session. The interview agent in the funding announcement is powered by Google Gemini. The broader product materials describe a system that turns those conversations into structured insights, summaries, role recommendations, relevance scores, and ranked matches.
What happens next is the part Fika cares about most. The platform slices interview responses into short clips and builds a live profile. It keeps that profile available for future openings instead of forcing the candidate to restart from zero every time a new role appears. Employers can post jobs or browse a pre-interviewed talent pool, while Fika’s matching layer recommends who fits what. That’s less like a classic applicant tracking system. More like a two-sided marketplace wrapped around AI interviews.
The hidden work is pretty technical. Fika’s hiring material points to retrieval and ranking systems, embeddings, vector databases, speech tooling, evaluation frameworks, and AI agents that can help source candidates. They also evaluate roles and run parts of the recruiting workflow. Its listed stack includes Node.js, TypeScript, Python, AWS, Next.js, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, LiveKit, and multiple model providers. So even if the front-end feels simple, the product is clearly being built as an AI-native hiring engine rather than a lightweight video layer on top of a jobs board.
There’s also a business-model twist. The service is free for job seekers, while employers pay only when they hire. That gives Fika a reason to obsess over match quality, not just activity on the platform.
Who founded Fika Jobs and what’s the backstory?
The founding story
Jakob Dubois is CEO. Alexander Dubois is CTO. They’re brothers, and the idea came out of a problem they ran into while building an earlier startup called Gaff, a social app focused on daily conversations with friends. While hiring there, they nearly passed on a candidate whose resume looked ordinary, then changed their minds after speaking with him. As Jakob put it, “within minutes, his grit, drive, and ambition became obvious. Exactly the kind of person we wanted to hire.”
That’s the entire Fika thesis in one moment.
The founders decided that some of the traits employers actually care about — energy, communication, ambition, judgment — are weakly represented on paper. So they built a product that flips the order. Let people talk first. Let employers watch later.
Founder market fit and track record
The Dubois brothers aren’t longtime HR software operators, and that cuts both ways. On the one hand, they don’t come from the old recruiting playbook. On the other, they’re repeat builders who found the pain firsthand while recruiting for Gaff. Jakob’s public profile ties him to Babson College and Hult International Business School, which fits the venture-backed, business-builder mold more than the traditional recruiter path. Alexander has taken the technical lead as CTO and has been front and center in Fika’s product and hiring push.
Early traction, launch timing, and funding
Fika Jobs is still early. The company is opening candidate early access in the week of June 23, 2026, with a broader public launch planned for fall 2026. It will focus on Sweden first, then expand internationally. The team is small today, but the founders expect it to reach around 10 employees by the end of 2026.
There are already some early signals. More than 100 companies are on the waitlist, and more than 50 have tested the platform, including Plenty Labs, SICS.ai, Kognity, and Rebtel. That’s not mass scale. But for a pre-launch marketplace product, it’s enough to show live demand on the employer side.
Luminar Ventures led the new $4 million pre-seed round, with participation from Alliance VC and King co-founders Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi. Fika says the capital will go into product development and team growth. It’ll also help prepare for a wider rollout later in 2026.
How Fika Jobs compares with Alex, Maki, and Mercor
This is where the company gets more interesting.
Alex, Maki, and Mercor all use AI in hiring, but they mostly attack the employer workflow. Alex automates phone screens and video interviews for companies and raised a $17 million Series A in September 2025 after a $3 million seed. Maki sells conversational AI agents into talent acquisition teams and closed a $28.6 million Series A in January 2025 after reporting more than 300% growth in 2024. Mercor raised $100 million at a $2 billion valuation in February 2025 and became one of the most visible names in AI-led recruiting.
Fika Jobs is taking a more candidate-centric route. Instead of helping employers process inbound applicants faster, it wants candidates to keep an always-on video profile that employers can discover over time. Pricing is part of the pitch too. Employers pay nothing upfront, and Fika takes 10% of first-year salary on a successful hire, below the 20% to 30% fee range common with recruiters and headhunters.
But the company’s biggest difference is also its biggest vulnerability. Video can surface charisma early. It can also surface race, age, gender presentation, disability cues, and accent before qualifications are weighed. That’s not a side issue. It’s the core tension in the product. Fika may make hiring feel more human, but it also strips away some of the anonymity that blind screening was designed to protect.
Why does Fika Jobs' $4M round matter?
This round matters because Fika isn’t just polishing a UI. It’s trying to build trust in a new hiring format.
To work, the company needs three things at once. It needs enough candidates willing to talk to an AI first and enough employers willing to browse video profiles instead of piles of resumes. It also needs matching systems that actually get better as more interviews flow through the platform. That’s hard. The pre-seed gives Fika time to tighten that loop before it pushes into a broader launch.
The investor list matters too. Luminar Ventures and Alliance VC have both backed Nordic software startups before, and the presence of Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi gives Fika founder-brand support that should help with recruiting, intros, and early credibility in Sweden’s startup market. For a marketplace-style hiring product, trust compounds slowly. Names like that speed up the first few steps.
How big is the hiring software market for Fika Jobs?
The broad AI-in-HR market was estimated at $3.25 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $15.24 billion by 2030, a 24.7% compound annual growth rate. That tells you this isn’t a niche software category anymore. Employers are already spending real money on AI for screening, matching, assessment, and workforce planning.
Fika sits even closer to video interviewing, and that segment is growing too. The video interviewing platform market was valued at $2.76 billion in 2025 and is expected to rise to $6.29 billion by 2031. Large enterprises still dominate spending, but smaller companies are projected to grow faster. That matters because startups and mid-size firms are often more willing to try a new hiring workflow than a giant corporate HR department is.
There’s another trend underneath all this. LinkedIn’s labor data showed AI engineering hiring grew more than 25% year over year in 2025, and McKinsey has argued that the labor market will put higher value on both digital and social-emotional skills. That combination is basically Fika’s whole pitch. Companies want technical ability, but they also want to see how someone thinks and communicates before they commit to a hire.
Should you bet on Fika Jobs yet?
Fika Jobs has a sharp idea, strong early backers, and a product that feels more distinct than a lot of AI recruiting startups do. It’s not just another automation layer for HR teams. It’s trying to change the unit of hiring from the resume to the interview.
Still, the company has to prove that video-first hiring can scale without amplifying bias or turning into a charisma contest. By fall 2026, the thing to watch won’t be the demo. It’ll be whether employers keep coming back after the novelty wears off.
Read how Menlo Ventures raised $3B in its largest-ever fundraise, leveraging its early Anthropic bet and AI-focused investment strategy to back the next generation of startups building on frontier AI models.
FAQ
- What funding did Fika Jobs raise? Fika Jobs raised a $4 million pre-seed round announced on June 23, 2026. Luminar Ventures led the round, with Alliance VC and King co-founders Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi also participating.
- How does Fika Jobs work for candidates and employers? Candidates connect a LinkedIn profile, complete an AI-led video interview, and get a reusable profile built from clips, summaries, and matching signals. Employers can browse that pre-interviewed pool or post roles. Then they can use the platform’s recommendation system instead of starting from a cold resume stack each time.
- Who founded Fika Jobs? Fika Jobs was founded in 2025 by brothers Jakob Dubois and Alexander Dubois, who serve as CEO and CTO. They came up with the idea after a hiring experience at their previous startup, Gaff, showed them how much a resume can miss.
- Is Fika Jobs a recruiting marketplace or HR software? It’s really a hybrid, but it leans more like a recruiting marketplace than a pure HR tool. The platform is free for job seekers, free upfront for employers, and makes money by taking 10% of a successful hire’s first-year salary — a model closer to recruiting than subscription software.
