Kalibrr

Kalibrr is a play on the word caliber, a word often used when referencing high quality talent.

Kalibrr's vision has always been to connect high quality talents with opportunities^[8] and when Kalibrr started in 2012, it built one of the first education to employment platforms that enabled Filipinos to up skill their English, technical and soft-skills online so they would be matched with jobs in the fast growing Philippine BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) industry.^[9]

The Kalibrr job portal launched in the Philippines in 2015^[10] and in Indonesia in 2016.^[11] As of January 2021, Kalibrr entered the remote work and EOR (Employer of Record) space helping hundreds of fast growing startups from the US, Europe and around the world recruit and manage teams in Southeast Asia.

Kalibrr's initial co-founders were Paul Rivera, Dexter Ligot-Gordon, and Danny Castonguay. Paul started his career as a Product Manager at Mercantila, an early e-commerce company based in San Francisco which was eventually acquired by Google. After Mercantila, Paul spent some time at Google before leaving in 2007 to co-found Open Access BPO with Ben Davidowitz, a pioneering outsourcing company that focused on serving fast-growing tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Paul successfully scaled that company and it was while building and scaling that business that he saw the problems in hiring and talent that inspired him to start Kalibrr.^[12]

Dexter was Paul's classmate at UC Berkeley where they both studied Political Economics and where Dexter was the UC Student Regent.^[13] Dexter spent his career as workforce consultant, helping design the systems that enabled governments like the City of San Francisco to create workforce development programs to help their constituents acquire the most relevant skills to qualify for fast growing local industries. Dexter exited Kalibrr in 2021 to launch his new venture, Swarm, a product, engineering and design community platform.

Danny Castonguay was the founder of Ant Portal, a Canadian software development company and he was studying for his MBA at MIT ^[14] when he met Paul and Dexter in Manila in 2012.^[15] This MBA was sponsored by McKinsey. In 2014, Danny Castonguay departed his full-time role as Kalibrr's founding CTO to re-join McKinsey as a Consultant.

Kalibrr's fourth co-founder was Sanuk Tandon, who was previously a founding team member and COO of Vasham, an agritech startup^[16] which was acquired by an Asian agriculture conglomerate, Japfa. Sanuk joined Kalibrr in early 2016 to launch their Indonesia business, a pivotal moment transforming the company from a single country player to a regional startup. In 2018, Sanuk moved into the COO^[17] role before assuming his current Co-CEO role to help Kalibrr scale its commercial activities globally whilst transforming the company into a profitable enterprise.

In 2021, Kalibrr was among the four Philippine companies to be listed in Forbes Asia's "100 to Watch" list.^[18]

Kalibrr received a pioneering grant from the Asian Development Bank in 2015^[19] that enabled Kalibrr to expand the suite of skills assessments it offered to jobseekers, assessments which are still used today and which have been used by millions of jobseekers.

Kalibrr was a publisher of jobs in Southeast Asia and saw an opportunity to increase its distribution by levering the largest platforms in the world. Kalibrr also partnered with the Philippine Government in 2015^[20] to digitize tens of thousands of government jobs,^[21] helping bring government recruitment online for the first time. They struck the first partnership with LinkedIn in 2016, with Facebook Jobs in 2018^[22] and with Google Jobs in 2019.^[23]

Kalibrr was selected as the Most Innovative Company in the 2016 Asia CEO Awards.^[24] Kalibrr is an Endeavor company,^[25] an Unreasonable^[26] company and its co-founder Paul Rivera was selected as a World Economic Forum Young Leader in 2021.^[27]