Abakar Saidov and the price of being overlooked

Abakar Saidov remembers a household food budget of £28 a week. He was a child when his family moved from Russia to Britain in the mid-1990s, old enough to notice that the adults’ abilities had travelled with them but their opportunities had not. His parents had qualifications and experience. Finding work that recognised either proved another matter. Years later, he and his brother Sultan would build a company around that mismatch.

Before there was enterprise software, there was a paper round. The brothers exaggerated their ages to get it, then reinvested the proceeds in a school sweetshop and, later, imported electronics. “It wasn’t called entrepreneurship,” Saidov recalled. A respectable founder biography might call this an early commercial instinct. At the time, it was a practical way to afford things. The business vocabulary arrived considerably later than the business.

The experience left him with a particular objection to recruitment: a person’s prospects could depend heavily on where they came from, even when their abilities were useful somewhere else. Beamery, the company he co-founded with Sultan and Michael Paterson, became his attempt to make those abilities easier for employers to see. The family problem acquired a software budget.

A banker with a different question

Saidov’s route into that work took him through finance. He studied economics at Warwick, worked at Goldman Sachs and then joined Francisco Partners, the technology investment firm. At Goldman, his work covered natural resources and renewables. At Francisco Partners, he managed software and technology investments. He had moved from analysing one kind of business to studying the machinery of another.

Those jobs gave him a view of companies from the side where money is allocated. Beamery would put him on the side where it has to be earned. It is a useful change of perspective for anyone selling software to large organisations: a buyer’s enthusiasm, a buyer’s budget and a buyer’s signature are three separate events.

The company began in London in 2013. Its purpose was personal, but its proposed customer was an employer. In Saidov’s account, the aim was to tackle the “passport lottery” through a system that helped businesses identify, recruit, develop and move talent. Access to opportunity would have to become useful enough for a company to buy.

Four days to get to New York

The early operation occupied his parents’ kitchen and living room. Applicants visiting from abroad sometimes stayed overnight because the company could not pay for hotels. On 3 January 2014, the founders heard that AngelPad had accepted them. They had four days to reach New York. An accelerator can sound pleasantly educational until it starts issuing travel deadlines.

The American trip did not immediately solve their funding problems. After a demo day and dozens of investor meetings, the founders returned to London without the capital they had hoped to raise. Friends, relatives and former colleagues helped keep the business going. The episode matters because the company’s eventual valuation can make its survival look more inevitable than it was.

The candidate gets the customer treatment

By April 2017, Beamery had raised $5 million in a round led by Index Ventures. Customers named at the time included Facebook, Dropbox, GitHub and VMware. The pitch was specific: companies should build relationships with prospective employees over time, using some of the same methods they already used to keep track of customers.

That meant combining recruitment with customer relationship management, marketing tools and artificial intelligence. Instead of starting a search afresh whenever a vacancy appeared, an employer could keep in touch with people whose abilities might fit a future opening. A promising candidate would have a life in the system beyond a single application.

The distinction sounds modest until you consider the alternative. A person applies, a vacancy closes, and the relationship disappears into an archive. Beamery’s proposition gave recruiters a reason to remember. Its planned expansion also showed the founders’ geography: engineering and product development would remain in Britain while the company built its commercial team in the United States.

“People want to be heard and seen”

Abakar Saidov, on the hiring experience

A billion dollars, with a date attached

In December 2022, Beamery announced a $50 million Series D round led by Teachers’ Ventures Growth, part of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. The company said the financing valued it above $1 billion. That figure belongs to that funding round: a dated measure of what investors were prepared to back.

By then the product’s scope had widened. Recruitment sat alongside internal mobility, development and upskilling. General Motors and Johnson & Johnson were among the customers Beamery named. The underlying question had grown from who a company should hire to what its workforce could already do, what it might learn and where it could move.

Beamery also reported that revenue from Fortune 500 customers had risen by more than 250 percent since its June 2021 Series C. These were company-reported figures, but they described the commercial wager clearly. Large employers were buying a broader view of their people. Saidov’s argument about overlooked ability had found a place in enterprise budgets.

The problem hiding in the spreadsheet

Saidov’s public writing offers a less glamorous view of how a skills-first organisation works. In April 2023, he argued that employers needed a common language for skills and a reliable picture of supply and demand. Information scattered across disconnected systems could not provide that picture if it failed to change when people learned something new.

His prescription began with the work a business needed to accomplish. Establish which skills it would require. Understand which already existed among employees, contractors, candidates and alumni. Identify the gaps. Then decide how to close them. The sequence gives the phrase “workforce transformation” a set of ordinary, answerable questions.

It also makes the ambition demanding. An employer must maintain the information after collecting it. Someone who has completed a project or acquired a new ability should become visible in a different way. Otherwise, the organisation merely owns a more elaborate description of its past. Saidov’s proposed role for AI was to help keep that picture coherent and current.

By October 2023, he was writing about skills as the currency of work. In that account, employers needed to look at tasks and capabilities, including what a person could learn, when making decisions about hiring and progression. A job title offered less detail than a picture of the work somebody could perform.

He also identified an awkward managerial habit: holding on to capable people. Internal mobility requires managers to accept that developing an employee may help another team. A company can buy software for finding talent and still reward behaviour that keeps it hidden. Saidov’s argument therefore asks for changes in incentives and learning, alongside changes in data.

A founder has to keep learning, too

The same expectation runs through his account of leading Beamery. In a January 2025 conversation about the business, Saidov discussed his continuing development through Andy Grove’s idea of a competence frontier. A growing company keeps presenting situations beyond the leader’s existing experience. Previous success provides experience; it does not supply every next answer.

He also placed weight on the customer’s experience of implementation. Enterprise software has to survive the moment when it meets an employer’s existing systems, habits and teams. For a company promising a better understanding of people, that encounter is part of the product’s credibility. The sale begins a relationship with plenty of opportunities to disappoint.

His explanation for starting businesses allowed two kinds of necessity: having few alternatives, or wanting an idea to exist so strongly that leaving it alone feels impossible. Either way, motivation has to last beyond the initial excitement. The paper round and the enterprise platform make an unusual pair, but both began with a problem close enough to require action.

In his writing about work, he has also argued that employers should invest in people’s development and take workplace culture seriously. Perks alone would not carry that responsibility. It is a consistent demand from somebody whose product asks companies to understand their employees in more detail: the understanding ought to lead somewhere useful.

Handing over the chief executive’s chair

On 28 April 2025, Beamery announced Sultan as its next CEO and Abakar as executive chairman. The new remit placed Abakar’s attention on customers, partners and other industry relationships. After years leading the company, he was taking a different role in carrying its argument into the market.

“Founding Beamery and serving as CEO has been the greatest privilege of my career,” he said at the time. He credited Sultan’s work on the company’s vision, platform and innovation. His subsequent role has been as a co-founder and board member. The April appointment marks a transition in the story, rather than a title to freeze indefinitely.

Europe enters the argument

By October 2025, Saidov was applying a related argument to European software companies. He pointed to fragmented markets, cautious corporate buyers and a shortage of executives who had already helped businesses scale. Technical talent could exist in abundance while the surrounding conditions made expansion harder.

He favoured entering the United States early while retaining European roots. His proposed remedies included simpler rules, incentives for businesses to buy from European software startups and more support for experienced founders to build again. These were his prescriptions, drawn from having sold across the two markets.

The connection to Beamery’s founding idea is hard to miss. Whether the subject is an applicant or a young company, Saidov keeps returning to the conditions that allow ability to become opportunity. The person or product may be ready. The next challenge is persuading somebody on the other side of the table to take a closer look.