The European freelancer marketplace Twago has taken a chunky investment from Randstad, one of the world’s top recruitment firms.
Twago focuses on the sorts of jobs freelancers can do from behind a keyboard – translation, design, coding and so on. It operates in much the same space as Elance and oDesk, but unlike those U.S. firms it’s willing to deal in languages other than English and handle European currency.
The Berlin-based firm filed for bankruptcy back in early 2012 after an angel investor vanished, but it swiftly returned with publishing and classifieds giant Müller Medien as majority investor. That company is again involved in the new financing round, which I understand is in a healthy seven-figure range, and it remains the majority stakeholder.
Randstad participated via its Randstad Innovation Fund, which the recruitment behemoth is using to tap into new human resources trends. This is the second investment for that initiative, after “mobile workforce” outfit Gigwalk. According to a statement from Randstad’s Paul Jacquin, “companies are more and more interested in short-term projects in order to meet demands for increased flexibility in a changing world of work.”
Twago, meanwhile, sees Randstad as a good partner for expanding its reach into the more traditional turf where the Dutch recruitment firm is so prevalent in Europe.
“Randstad is very strong in Europe and has access to a great variety of small, medium and even large enterprises where we don’t have access,” Twago founder Thomas Jajeh (pictured) told me, explaining that Twago had previously relied mostly on online marketing. “We can greatly benefit in terms of scale.”
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