ECOSYSTEM | WHO’S GOT VC | Q&A | STARTUP FINANCE
RECLAIMING YOUR ENTREPRENEURIAL DREAMS
Sahiqa and Harvey Bennett, co-founders of Searchie, an AI-based tech platform that helps companies transform the way they hire, on life and lessons learnt in the startup sphere b y TA M A R A P U P I C
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hen Sahiqa Bennett was growing up in Milton Keynes, UK, her career dreams amounted to making people, especially women, “believe in themselves more and know they can do anything they want.” From there, as per an unwritten plan, her story has unfolded to include moving to Dubai, and disrupting the recruitment and talent industry. Sahiqa and her husband and business partner Harvey Bennett have been furiously busy since March 2018 when they launched Searchie, an AI-based tech platform aimed at revolutionizing the talent industry through smart matching. While the scale of their ambition is clear -"Transforming the industry not just from a technology
perspective but from a planning, strategy and process perspective,” explains Harvey- the huge investor interest in their business did come as a surprise, forcing them to accelerate the company’s growth plans. Namely, the Searchie cofounders have already closed a US$500,000 part of their $2 million seed round with Hackers & Founders, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, within their latest $250 million fund, making it the fund’s first MENA investment. “My dream was to raise money from Silicon Valley, and I just didn’t realize it would happen as fast as it did,” explains Sahiqa. “Having said that, we’re also currently in talks with venture capitalists from the US, the UK, the GCC region, as well as Asia, and I think there are advantages to having both local and international VCs. Our business is global so
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having a Silicon Valley investor has and will continue to open up doors to large potential clients as well as local VCs. The US investors tend to think big which is in line with our mindset. These days you need investors who add value and take you to the big stage.” So, how did they come this far so quickly? Sahiqa explains that recruitment has traditionally been done in a very reactive way, and that the agency model had not been challenged for decades, which resulted in them wanting to bring it more in line with today’s market needs that were not being fully met globally. To
"SEARCHIE IS A SOCIAL IMPACT COMPANY WHICH IS ABOUT THE TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE, SUSTAINABILITY, PROFIT AND HELPING SOCIETY.”
put their knowledge of the industry into perspective, it must be noted that the Bennetts have been running a traditional recruitment agency -Searchie & Searchie- for the past four years, which “is a long time to go through market research,” Harvey notes. He adds that Searchie has a three-sided business model, meaning that his team first created multiple personas to understand the pain points from all three sides of the canvas -employer, candidate, recruiter- and, consequently, developed three options: a success-based model (when the employer and candidate reach an agreement to work together, they get paid a success fee, which is about 40% cheaper than using a typical recruitment agency), a recruitment as a service offering (a softwareas-a-service) model for recruitment, where a client pays a monthly subscrip-
Sahiqa and Harvey Bennett, co-founders, Searchie
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