You can take the refugee out of the refugee camp, says Jon Purizhansky, but you’ll never erase the pain of that experience.
The Buffalo-based attorney-turned-tech entrepreneur is using his history as fuel to build a social enterprise startup that helps protect transient employees from predatory middlemen.
Joblio, launched a year ago, is a global talent marketplace for migrant workers.
As it currently stands, workers in underdeveloped areas have to take out loans to pay middlemen, who set them up with jobs that can range from cleaning to fruit-picking. The middlemen often over-promise and under deliver, leading to problems for the employees and their prospective employers.
Joblio is a carefully managed software-as-a-service platform for those employers, who can connect directly with new pools of talent around the world (they only work with companies that provide free housing for the workers). And for the migrant workers themselves, it’s a free and transparent way to escape the tethers of poverty and lawlessness.
“Joblio walks into this ecosystem and brings order to it without creating additional financial pressure from the corporate sector,” Purizhansky said. “They’re not only doing the right thing, but they’re gaining efficiency, new revenue and transparency at no extra cost.”
The 1998 graduate of the University at Buffalo Law School is moving fast. He recently closed a $4 million seed round from a strategic corporate investor and employs about 60 people across the globe. The workforce is distributed, and he is the only Western New York employee, for now, though he is advised by John Gavigan, who leads Endeavor’s Western New York chapter, and Dennis Vacco, the former state Attorney General who is now a partner at Lippes Mathias Wexler Friedman law firm.
Jon Purizhansky said he is open to building an employee cluster in Buffalo, but that his focus is on creating the best company possible as Joblio scales quickly. The company has opened up its marketplace in Poland and Romania, is launching soon in the United Arab Emirates, and is working on several large partnerships with organizations that can instantly grant them access to large groups of people.
He wants to change things quickly, referencing Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s capitalism-based approach at driving social change.
“I want to build a huge company, which I’m confident we’re going to do,” Purizhansky said. “We don’t take anything from anyone, and we have the corporate sector funding it.”
Joblio is the 18th local company to acknowledge growth-oriented financing this year. The others include Jerry ($103 million), Squire ($60 million), Tackle.io ($35 million), Torch Labs ($25 million), Circuit Clinical ($7.5 million), SomaDetect ($6 million), Kickfurther ($5.9 million), HELIXintel ($1.6 million), Patient Pattern ($1.2 million), Ellicottville Greens ($1 million), Ognomy ($700,000), Braid Babes ($415,000), MemoryFox ($380,000) and Zizo Technologies ($200,000) and Thimble.io ($125,000) and Classavo (undisclosed).
Originally Posted: https://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/news/2021/08/18/joblio-seed-round-funding.html