Stockholm-based Fika Jobs has raised a $4 million pre-seed round to build what it describes as a video-first hiring platform, where candidates are interviewed by an AI agent rather than screened through resumes, as reported by TechCrunch. The round was led by Luminar Ventures, with participation from Alliance VC and King co-founders Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi, the duo behind Candy Crush.
The product
Candidates connect their LinkedIn profile, after which Fika’s AI generates personalised questions and conducts a roughly 10-minute video interview. The system then edits the responses into short-form clips that form a persistent profile employers can browse. The feel is closer to a hybrid of LinkedIn and TikTok than a conventional applicant tracking system.
The idea came from a hiring experience at co-founder and CEO Jakob Dubois’s previous startup Gaff, where the team nearly overlooked a strong candidate whose resume didn’t stand out, but whose qualities became apparent in conversation.
The business model
Fika is free for job seekers. Employers pay nothing up front but owe Fika 10% of a successful hire’s first-year salary. That is materially below the placement fees traditional recruiters typically charge, according to the company. Companies are on the waitlist and have tested the platform, including Plenty Labs, SICS.ai, Kognity, and Rebtel. Early access opens this week, with a broader launch planned for the autumn and initial focus on the Swedish market.
The bias question
The structural trade-off in video-first hiring is unavoidable: employers see race, age, gender, appearance, and accent before they evaluate qualifications. TechCrunch flags this explicitly, noting that blind resume screening exists precisely because the resume, for all its flaws, partially obscures attributes that drive discrimination. The broader concern, well-rehearsed across a decade of academic and regulatory debate over algorithmic hiring, is that automated systems can encode rather than eliminate bias when the assessment inputs themselves include demographic signals. A video feed is the strongest demographic signal of all.
The BBC has separately reported on candidate concerns that AI interviews are reshaping the hiring funnel in ways that disadvantage applicants who don’t perform well on camera or whose communication style diverges from model expectations.
Why this matters
Fika sits in a crowded market. Silicon Canals has previously covered Amsterdam-based Carv, Stockholm-based Hubert, and Paris-based Maki People, each applying AI to a different layer of recruitment. What distinguishes Fika structurally is the inversion of the workflow: candidates build a persistent, AI-evaluated asset that employers browse, rather than employers posting jobs that candidates chase.
That shift carries an underlying economic logic. By holding the evaluated candidate pool, Fika positions itself between employer and hire at the highest-margin moment in recruitment — placement. The 10% success fee captures recruiter economics while AI displaces recruiter labour. Whether the platform’s bias safeguards keep pace with that economic leverage is the question that will determine whether video-first hiring becomes the next standard or the next cautionary case study.
