One of Pakistan’s earliest and most successful web businesses, the jobs portal Rozee.pk, is making waves yet again by becoming the first Pakistani tech startup to acquire a rival site in another country. This comes with Rozee’s acquisition of Mihnati, which claims to be the top online recruitment platform in Saudi Arabia. The financial terms of the deal haven’t been revealed.
Rozee.pk founder Monis Rahman spent 10 years working in Silicon Valley before he moved back to Pakistan. After the HR site started in Lahore in 2007, it became the first startup in the nation to get investment from Silicon Valley VCs in 2008, with Draper Fisher Jurvetson and ePlanet Capital ploughing in money. Now Rozee has job postings submitted by 54,000 employers and is browsed by about 16 million people.
(Updated 24 hours after posting: Added in this paragraph and the next with details Monis provided via email). The site’s founder explains, “We have merged both Rozee.pk and Mihnati by migrating all Mihnati employers and jobseekers on to the Rozee.pk technology platform. By doing this, we gave our Saudi sales team a far more powerful product to sell with more features.” Mihnati will retain its name, which means ‘my career’ in Arabic. All the back-end integration will result in cost savings for both sites. Monis adds:
The Rozee.pk technology platform is fairly robust and scalable, processing over 40,000 job applications each day and utilizing our custom built CV search engine and matching algorithms. With our acquisition of Mihnati, we not only have translated all of our products into Arabic but have also tweaked our algorithms to simultaneously parse, search, and display both English and Arabic matching CVs, regardless of the language the search was conducted in. We have thus built the world’s first bilingual fuzzy translating CV search engine.
Monis explained to BlueChip Mag about the Mihnati buy-out:
It became clear that we could leverage what we created in Pakistan to service other international markets with higher purchasing power. After a thorough analysis of emerging markets with large internet penetration, high per capita GDP and low competition, Saudi Arabia was number one on our list. Over 60 percent of the Middle East’s recruiting budgets reside in Saudi Arabia. Having spent my early childhood in Riyadh, I am also particularly fond of the Kingdom and a fervent believer in its potential.
We discovered Mihnati.com during our market research of Saudi Arabia and were attracted by the fantastic team and a client-base consisting of the country’s largest business groups. We also saw an opportunity to add considerable value to Mihnati’s customer base through our product portfolio, back office operations and business experience in online recruiting. The Mihnati acquisition short-cut our entry into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by two years while acquiring a team and partners with strong knowledge of Saudi market dynamics.
Source: Tech In Asia
