Jérémy Clédat runs a company that asks employers an uncomfortable question: what is it actually like to work here? Welcome to the Jungle, the business he co-founded and co-leads, has turned that question into a platform used by thousands of companies and visited by millions of job seekers each month.
Today Clédat sits at the head of one of Europe's most recognizable work-experience brands. Welcome to the Jungle is not a conventional job board. It mixes editorial media, video, company profiles and recruiting tools to show candidates the texture of a workplace before they ever send a CV. By early 2023 the company counted more than 5,000 client companies, close to three million unique monthly visitors, and roughly €30 million in annual recurring revenue. That January it closed a €50 million Series C, pushing total funding to about €79 million and setting up a serious expansion into the United States, run out of New York.
The pitch is simple and stubborn. Clédat argues the recruiting industry has a trust problem, and that transparency is the fix. "What the recruiting industry lacks is authenticity and transparency," he has said. Rather than let companies market themselves in glossy abstractions, Welcome to the Jungle pushes them to show real offices, real teams and real ways of working. "To stand out from the crowd, you need to show the working environment," he told one interviewer. The product is, in effect, recruitment reimagined as media.
What the recruiting industry lacks is authenticity and transparency.Jérémy Clédat, co-founder & co-CEO
The numbers behind the jungle
From financier to founder
Before he was building a company, Clédat was funding them. He studied at ESCP Business School and then spent about six years in venture capital, concentrating on three sectors that would later shape his own venture: media, HR and education. That period gave him a close-up view of what makes companies grow and where they fail their own people.
He also learned what he did not want. Early in his career he logged brutal hours in finance, the kind of 100-hour weeks that leave little room for a life. The experience left him convinced that work itself could be designed differently. That conviction, more than any single product idea, is the seed of Welcome to the Jungle. The company launched in 2015, and Clédat has repeatedly framed the ambition in outsized terms, borrowing a maxim he has cited in interviews: aim to do things ten times better, not ten percent better.
Zoom cannot be the work tool of the next 10 years.On the future of the office
A name borrowed from rock and roll
The brand carries an unusual origin story. A fan of Guns N' Roses, Clédat wanted a name that would travel - a positive English phrase that could resonate in a global job market. He landed on "Welcome to the Jungle," lifted from the band's 1987 anthem. It is the kind of choice that reveals his instinct for branding: memorable, a little irreverent, and built to be said out loud. A decade on, the rock-anthem name fronts a company that talks in the serious language of employer branding, retention and the changing shape of work.
In 2020, Clédat co-authored 100 idées innovantes pour recruter des talents et les faire grandir with Laetitia Vitaud - a practical field guide to attracting and developing talent, distilling the ideas behind the platform into a book.
The four-day week, put to the test
Clédat is not content to preach better work from the outside. In 2019 Welcome to the Jungle ran a four-day work week trial from June to October. When it ended, the company kept it - permanently, and without cutting salaries. The bet was that a genuine day of decompression would give employees a stronger sense of control over their work and their lives. Clédat has said the extra day proved especially valuable when the pandemic arrived, helping the company handle the shift to hybrid work earlier than most.
He is clear-eyed about the tensions remote work creates. "Teleworking is intrusive; it highlights differences in lifestyle and travel time," he has noted, arguing that companies need to design flexible offices and watch for career-progression gaps between remote and in-office staff. His skepticism about video-first work is blunt: "Zoom cannot be the work tool of the next 10 years." The future he describes is not a grid of faces but places and experiences worth showing up for.
Growth, in proportion
The funding trajectory tells the growth story in three rounds, capped by the 2023 Series C led with a roster of new backers alongside returning investors. The capital is earmarked for two things: sharpening employer-branding features and localizing the product for the American market.
On closing the round, Clédat struck a characteristically ambitious note: "This third funding round is a triumphant way to end 2022 - we have what it takes to keep revolutionizing the staffing sector." The United States is the obvious test. A French work-culture brand built on transparency now has to prove the idea resonates in a far larger, more crowded market.
What he is really building
Strip away the funding rounds and the rock-anthem name, and Clédat's project is consistent: make work more human, and make hiring honest. He has spent a decade arguing that companies win talent by showing the truth rather than selling a fantasy, and he has structured his own company - four-day week included - as a working proof of the argument. Whether that translates across the Atlantic is the open question of his next chapter. What is not in doubt is the conviction behind it, forged years ago in an office where the hours were long and the work felt like something that could, and should, be built better.