A marketplace born on a $5 promise now sits at the center of the AI-and-work fight - and it is trying to hand the paintbrush to the people, not the machine.
Talently is a Latin American tech-talent marketplace that connects US and global companies with senior, bilingual, AI-vetted software engineers and digital professionals across LATAM. Founded in Peru in 2018, it began as an upskilling platform and pivoted into a hiring and staff-augmentation engine that delivers vetted candidate shortlists in 48-72 hours and gets teams up and running in about 21 days. The company blends automated technical and English screening with human-led evaluations for culture and communication fit, and handles contracts, payroll, compliance, and IP.
Matthew Wilson is the co-founder and CEO of Jack & Jill, a London-based startup building two conversational AI recruiters - Jack for job seekers and Jill for employers - to replace the resume-and-keyword model of hiring. An Oxford-trained theoretical physicist turned serial founder, he previously co-founded Veratrak and scaled the global-employment company Omnipresent to a roughly $600M valuation in three years before its acquisition by Deel. In October 2025, six months after starting Jack & Jill, he raised a $20M seed round led by Creandum with backing from over 75 angels including Nico Rosberg.
Robert Kowalski is the co-founder and CEO of Gyfted, a behavioral-science recruiting platform that matches people to jobs and teams on personality, culture fit and ability rather than CVs. A Stanford GSB MBA and LSE economist, he built Gyfted with Stanford computational psychologist Michal Kosinski and engineer Adam Szefer to make remote hiring faster and less biased. He signs his own title 'Village Idiot ie. CEO' and frames the entire recruiting industry as broken and worth flipping over.