AdAsia restructures, adds recruitment tech

AdAsia has formed a new parent company, AnyMind Group, in a business reorganisation that includes a new HR recruitment technology firm TalentMind along with the existing ad tech startup and influencer platform CastingAsia.

The announcement was made in Bangkok on Thursday by co-founder and CEO of the new group CEO Kosuke Sogo. He said the new names were inspired by the company’s focus on using AI to scale into other industries. “TalentMind is our first venture outside of marketing and advertising technology,” said Sogo. “Ultimately we want to power businesses and professionals with a suite of AI-based solutions, enabling them to easily achieve greater scale and efficiency within and across departments,” he added.

Masayasu Morita, founder and CEO of education company and human resource company Hitomedia was appointed as an advisor to TalentMind. The recruitment tech platform will first be run in Thailand where its team is based and also where the company has the biggest team. 

TalentMind describes its new recruitment platform services through four phases:

• Screening to leverage social media and résumé data to determine a prospect’s cultural fit and personality through candidate profiles
• Analytics to develop custom hiring models for companies that evolve in real-time
• Sourcing to engage with candidates directly on the platform
• Matching to provide candidate-to-company matching based on organizational hiring and talent models

The new parent company is intended as a rebranding exercise to facilitate the company’s venture into other fields beyond ad tech. The group hopes to increase the total headcount to 400 from over 250 currently by the end of this year.

AnyMind Group’s biggest markets are in Thailand and other emerging economies such as Vietnam and Indonesia. The 21-month-old firm has enjoyed rapid expansion to 10 offices in nine countries after setting up in Singapore in April 2016. It plans to open in Malaysia and Philippines in Q1 2018, as well as India, UAE and Russia within this year.

Vivek Misra, VP of corporate strategy had spoken about the company’s plan to go into recruitment during an interview with Campaign Asia-Pacific last September when the company announced the full scalability of its AI tools for CastingAsia.

Besides the new business structure, the group also announced the launch of CastingAsia Marketplace that connects influencers with brands. CastingAsia launched in August last year to tie influencer marketing with programmatic advertising is currently focused on the Southeast Asia market.

Shingo Hayashi was named as the regional head for CastingAsia in a newly created role. “We currently have a base of over 10,000 influencers and mirco-influencers, and we’re aiming to grow this five times to 50,000 by the end of the year. This will make us the fastest-growing and largest influencer marketing platform in Asia,” said Hayashi.