In 2014, Oswald Yeo and his co-founders did something most hungry startup founders never do. Investors offered them more money than they had asked for, and they said no. They had aimed for about US$400,000, and they turned away roughly US$250,000 of it, saying they did not want to raise so much just yet.
It was a strange thing for people in their early twenties to do, and that is exactly what they were. Yeo, Seah Ying Cong and Looi Qin En had met at Hwa Chong Institution, one of Singapore's elite schools, and had gone on to universities abroad. Then they paused their studies to chase something that began very small. In August 2013, the platform had just 38 members. The idea was to help friends find internships at young companies, and in the early days it was little more than a way of linking people through a spreadsheet.
What nobody outside the company saw was the cost of being that young and that close.
That modesty ran through the first years. By April 2015, Glints had more than 7,000 active members, and a seed round of US$475,000 led by East Ventures had given the three founders room to work. But a bigger problem than money was a market that did not yet care. Young graduates in Southeast Asia wanted jobs, employers complained they could not find good people, and nobody had built something that served both sides across borders.
What nobody outside the company saw was the cost of being that young and that close. In 2017, Looi left. He said it was down to creative friction. He went back, finished his degree, and later joined Boston Consulting Group. A company founded by school friends had lost one of its three originals while it was still small.
The turn came when Glints stopped being a place to find internships and became a hiring engine. It charged employers only after a successful hire, which made it easy for startups to try. In 2018 the listed Singapore recruiter HRnetGroup invested. In 2019 it raised US$6.8 million to enter Vietnam and Hong Kong. In 2021, Japan's PERSOL led a US$22.5 million round, then the largest into a career platform in Southeast Asia. In 2022 came US$50 million more, bringing the total to roughly US$80 million.
Glints today runs recruitment, a training academy and a community for young professionals across several markets. It has not gone public, and its revenue is not published.
The odd lesson sits back in 2014. Yeo's team treated money as something to be earned in steps, not grabbed in the first excited week. They took less than they were offered, built for a year, and went back when they could show members and hires. A founder who can say no to cash that is on the table is usually a founder who knows exactly what that cash is for.