Stockholm-based Fika Jobs raised a $4 million pre-seed round to build a hiring platform where AI agents conduct 10-minute video interviews and candidates maintain live, TikTok-style profiles that employers browse on demand. Luminar Ventures led the round, with Alliance VC and King co-founders Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi — the duo behind Candy Crush — participating. The pitch is that resumes screen out the wrong people, and that a short structured video interview captures signal a PDF never will.
The interview agent runs on Google's Gemini models. A candidate connects a LinkedIn profile, Fika's system generates personalized questions from that background, and the candidate sits a roughly 10-minute video interview with the AI. The platform then chops the responses into short clips and assembles them into a persistent profile employers can revisit as new roles open.
Pricing is the wedge. Fika is free for job seekers and charges employers 10% of a successful hire's first-year salary, against the 20% to 30% that traditional recruiters and headhunters typically take. There is no upfront fee for companies — Fika only earns on placement, which puts it in direct competitive range of agency recruiters rather than ATS vendors.
Key facts
- 01Fika Jobs raised a $4M pre-seed led by Luminar Ventures, with Alliance VC and King co-founders Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi participating.
- 02Candidates complete a roughly 10-minute video interview with an AI agent built on Google's Gemini models.
- 03Fika charges 10% of a candidate's first-year salary on a hire, versus the 20% to 30% placement fees typical of traditional recruiters.
- 04More than 100 companies are on the waitlist and over 50 have tested the platform, including Plenty Labs, SICS.ai, Kognity, and Rebtel.
- 05The team plans to grow to roughly 10 employees by year-end, with a broader public launch in the fall after early access opens this week.
Co-founders and brothers Jakob Dubois (CEO) and Alexander Dubois (CTO) built the product after a recruiting near-miss at their previous startup, the social app Gaff, where a strong candidate almost got cut on the basis of a thin resume.
More than 100 companies are on the waitlist, the founders said, and more than 50 have already tested the platform, including Plenty Labs, SICS.ai, Kognity, and Rebtel. Early access for candidates opens this week. A broader public launch is scheduled for the fall, with Sweden as the initial market before any international push. The team expects to reach roughly 10 employees by the end of the year.
Fika is positioning itself differently from the rest of the AI hiring stack. Alex, Maki, and Mercor focus on the employer side — sourcing, screening, and matching candidates against open roles. Fika flips that: candidates carry the AI-evaluated profile with them, and employers browse a pool of people who have already sat the interview. It is closer in spirit to a professional network than to an applicant tracking system, which is also why the LinkedIn and TikTok comparisons keep showing up.
The bet is that early-career workers and candidates from non-traditional backgrounds will adopt fastest, because they are the ones whose resumes most reliably underrepresent them. A 10-minute structured interview is also a much cheaper screen than the human phone screens it would replace — for high-volume roles, the math is straightforward.
Video-first hiring carries an obvious bias risk that resume-only and blind-screening workflows are designed to suppress. When an evaluator — human or model — sees a candidate's race, age, gender, appearance, and accent before reading any qualifications, the surface area for discrimination widens. Fika has not published details on how its scoring pipeline mitigates this, what auditing the Gemini-backed agent receives, or how employers are constrained in what they see and when. Regulators in the EU and several US states have begun pressing AI hiring vendors on exactly these questions, and any platform built on video signal will face that scrutiny on a tighter timeline than a resume-parsing tool would.
The interesting structural move here is the persistent candidate profile. Most AI hiring tools sit inside the employer's workflow and run per-application. Fika is trying to own the candidate-side artifact — the video profile itself — and rent access to employers. If that artifact becomes the thing candidates maintain instead of a resume, the platform inherits LinkedIn-style network effects rather than ATS-style switching costs. That is a far more valuable position than yet another screening tool, and it is also why the 10% placement fee model can work: Fika is competing with recruiters for the placement economics, not with software vendors for seat licenses.
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