Enygma Ventures announced on Tuesday that it has made a R 4.2m investment into Job Crystal, South Africa’s recruitment company.
“Never has there been a more critical time to get South African’s back into work,” says Sarah Dusek, managing partner and co-founder of Enygma Ventures.
“We see the recruitment industry as vital in South Africa’s economic recovery enabling employers to navigate finding the right talent, quickly and efficiently, getting more people back to work sooner.”
This investment into Job Crystal will enable this female-led company to develop incredible technology to speed up the process of recruitment making it easier for employers to hire the right talent faster than ever, making a dent in unemployment rates at the same time.
“We’re thrilled to receive this investment from Enygma Ventures which will help us to improve our tech development and expand our footprint across the country and region,” says Job Crystal Managing Director and Co-Founder Sasha Knott.
Job Crystal Co-Founder and Operations Director Kelly Louw says, “When we look at how high the general unemployment rate in South Africa is, which increased to 30.1% during the first quarter of 2020, with 63.3%² of the 7.1 million unemployed people consisting of our youth, we have our work cut out; especially now the global Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated these numbers.”
JobCrystal was created in 2009 with one vision – to find talent that makes an organisation great and reach its full potential.
Job Crystal was started by Karl Westvig and Kevin Laithwaite in 2009, with the intention to be a formidable online job platform that corporate companies in South Africa could use to find experienced and qualified candidates. During the next 5 years they created an online platform, that was the start of the ‘AI’ movement in matching skills to specs.
Being entrepreneurs at the time Karl and Kevin decided to sell Job Crystal and focus on other businesses within the financial services space and sold the business to Kelly Louw and Sasha Knott in 2015.
Between 2015 to 2017 Kelly and Sasha put all revenues back into the business to rebrand and reformat the job platform and website, while both working in other businesses at the time. Within the last 2 years, both directors have joined the business full time, in a well-spaced period, to allow the business to grow and stabilize while ensuring consistent cash flow for the business.
Startup Circles CEO Sandras Phiri says, “Job Crystal has strongly positioned itself within the recruitment market focusing on small and medium sized businesses with a passion for solving Africa’s unemployment crisis using technology and smart problem-solving skills. This is what we at Shift Fund are looking for – businesses that combine smart, innovative strategies and technologies in scalable models.”
Applications are currently open to the Shift Fund. All entrepreneurs and innovators in Africa who have existing businesses and ideas that are still in ideation stage and have the capability to solve Africa’s challenges in a post-pandemic world are welcome to apply here before applications close on Monday 31 August.
