Glints is one of Southeast Asia's largest talent platforms — a marketplace, a recruitment service, and an employer-of-record rolled into one. If you're a company hiring engineers or building a team across Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, or Taiwan, it's a serious, well-funded option worth understanding before you commit. Glints was founded in August 2013 in Singapore by three high-school friends — Oswald Yeo, Looi Qin En, and Seah Ying Cong — who deferred places at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Wharton to build it (Wikipedia), KrASIA). What started as a career-development site for students has grown into what the company calls a full-stack talent ecosystem for Southeast Asia. It's genuinely well-backed. Glints has raised roughly $80 million across five rounds, capped by a $50 million Series D in August 2022 co-led by DCM Ventures, Lavender Hill Capital, and returning investor PERSOL Holdings (TechCrunch, Monk's Hill Ventures). That's real institutional weight behind a regional hiring platform.

At the time of its Series D, Glints reported around three million professionals on the platform and 50,000 companies hiring through it, including names like AIA, IKEA, GetGo, KKday, and Gameloft (TechCrunch). It operates across five markets — Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan — with expansion into the Philippines (Monk's Hill Ventures).

The model is layered. There's the self-serve marketplace where candidates apply to posted roles. There's a recruitment service where Glints' talent agents source, screen, and support you through to offer negotiation (KrASIA). And there's a managed, cross-border layer where Glints acts as employer-of-record — letting a company hire someone in Indonesia or Vietnam without setting up a local entity. Remote cross-border postings grew more than 3x year-over-year around the Series D, and the company reported revenue and gross profit up 2.5x (TechCrunch).

Southeast Asian reach. This is the core strength. If you specifically want talent in Indonesia, Vietnam, or the wider SEA region, few platforms match Glints' density of local candidates and on-the-ground presence. Cross-border employment handled for you. The employer-of-record layer is real value. Hiring in a country where you have no entity is otherwise a legal and payroll headache, and Glints absorbs that. Volume and range. Three million professionals across many functions — engineering, marketing, operations, sales — means you can staff broadly, not just for one hard-to-fill role. Human support, not just a job board. The talent agents who shepherd a hire through to negotiation put Glints above pure self-serve boards for buyers who don't want to run the whole funnel themselves.

Glints is a marketplace and a regional staffing platform, and that shapes what it's best at. The strength is breadth across Southeast Asia and across many roles — which is a different thing from surgically finding the single best AI engineer for one specific, senior build. The candidates you meet are, by design, the ones active on the platform and open to being matched. That's a great fit when you want responsive, available talent quickly. It's a different job when the person you actually need for a hard AI problem isn't browsing a marketplace at all. And the value is heavily regional. If your hiring is centered on Southeast Asia, that focus is exactly what you want. If you're hiring globally for elite, AI-native engineering specifically, a SEA-anchored platform is solving a different problem than the one you have.

Here's the thing about any marketplace, Glints included: you're picking from who signed up. The best engineers usually aren't on a marketplace at all. The ones you actually want are already working — booked on a contract somewhere else, heads-down on a hard problem, not sitting in a pool waiting to be matched. Nextdev reaches the top 1% of AI engineers — the ones who aren't looking. We go find them. Then we prove them. We give each a real problem to build and watch how they actually work. So you know they're AI-native because you've seen it, not because a profile or a marketplace badge said so. A platform hands you a candidate and leaves two jobs on your desk: verify they can really do the work, and figure out how to employ them. We do both. When you want one, we employ them for you. One named engineer. The contract, payroll, and compliance never touch your desk. You're not picking from who signed up. You're getting the engineer who never would have.

Glints is a strong, well-funded platform, and for hiring across Southeast Asia — at volume, across functions, with cross-border employment handled — it's a genuinely smart choice. If that's your problem, use it. If your problem is landing the single best AI-native engineer for a hard build, that's a different search, and it's the one Nextdev runs.