The company with foreign capital «XOR» is one of the most unconventional in the Moldovan IT-business. It is an example of how a small startup in the field of recruitment automation has grown into an international recruiting platform serving such major operators as HeadHunter, Amazon, IKEA, Cisco, Exxon, McDonald’s, X5 Retail Group. In the four years since its launch, XOR has attracted $8.2 million in investment in Silicon Valley. Now this project is valued at more than $50 million and its capitalization is constantly growing.
This company was set up by two young specialists: recruiter Aida Fazilova and programmer Nikolai Manolov. The partners started their joint business from the Russian recruitment market, where they worked for almost a year. «XOR» was initially positioned as a virtual recruiter, its «feature» — chatbots for hiring. Such a product automates over 80% of routine operations of recruiters and reduces the time of hiring a candidate, on average, by 50%. The company’s know-how allows faster and more efficient processing of the flow, closing up to 40% more vacancies. Finally, the chatbot enables the customer to save money: it is much cheaper to implement a robot than to train new people in the subtleties of recruiting.
The company was able to sell one of these products to X5 Retail Group. The Russian retail leader hires 165,000 people (loaders, salespeople, cashiers, warehouse workers) every year, and this program significantly simplified its recruiting processes. Following it, other large Russian companies, in particular Mail.ru and hh.ru, became XOR clients.
A year later, XOR entered the US market, where it began to actively promote its technologies based on chatbots and artificial intelligence. In March 2019, its largest anchor client was Manpower, a global HR giant with 4,000 offices in over 80 countries and 30,000 in-house recruiters. Now XOR has more than 140 clients. About 60% of them are direct employers hiring from 100 employees per month (ExxonMobil, CHI, etc.). The remaining 40% come from reputable recruitment agencies (AcsendHR, Manpower Group, Delta Dallas).
Two years ago, the company registered an office in Moldova, where its production and sales departments are centered. The headquarters of XOR is located in the American San Francisco. The main sales market is also related to the USA.
According to Nikolai Manolov, co-owner of the company, the American labor market is now the most promising. «At the time of our expansion, the unemployment rate in the USA did not exceed 3%, candidates there have always dictated the conditions. Now, during the pandemic, there are about 50 million people out of work in America. They will need to be employed, and XOR is ideally suited for that. The program has a high throughput: you can process even a million candidates in a day. In addition, our bot supports 105 languages. None of our American competitors — Allyo, Mya Systems, Textrecruit — have such an advantage.
Nicolai Manolov noted that in Moldova he works with only a few clients, among which is Moldtelecom. The Moldovan labor market is not yet in the scope of the company’s interests. It is low-capacity and is based on several factors, one of which is shadow labor. There is a big deficit of professionals and an overabundance of unqualified personnel. At one time «XOR» even launched a project «Hai acasa», searching for IT-specialists who left for work in London and the USA. Now the company has 60 employees, by December it will have a maximum of 90. A strong engineering team has been formed: these are highly qualified «specialists», all of them from Moldova.
«Today, XOR as a business project is valued at over $50 million. In a year and a half, it will be worth $200 million. But our goal is to increase the value of the company to $1 billion, so that we can sell it later or go public. Our plan from the beginning was to create a unique product, «hook» the market for it, and attract financing from American investors, developing according to the venture model. We have already received $8.2 million in the investment fund SignalFire, which specializes in projects in the field of artificial intelligence. XOR’s growth rate is 40% per year. We plan to spin out two more rounds of investment and start looking for a potential buyer.»
This means that the entire history of the company must be transparent from day one. In this respect, the owners of XOR have always relied on professional consulting: it saves time and money, and insures against unforeseen situations.
«Our company has three offices — in Russia, in Moldova and in the USA,» said Mr. Manolov. — In each of these countries we have a partner who deals with document flow and taxes and knows the specifics of the national legislation. For the Moldovan office I was looking for a strong consulting company, choosing Brodsky Uskov Looper Reed & Partners. And I have never regretted it. It has a competent approach to business: the smallest risks are calculated in advance in order to prevent a problem, rather than solve it when time is running out. It is very important for us to entrust some issues to professionals, focusing on what we do best.
Irina MATENKO, Economicheskoe Obozrenie «Logos Press»