By Riley Kaminer
The pandemic has proven that talent is global. Employees can work from anywhere, while employers can tap into an international talent pool.
Well, that’s the theory at least. The practice is not so straightforward. Barriers abound: from navigating financial systems and regulatory issues to cultural quirks and misunderstandings, building a cross-border company is not so straightforward.
Miami-based Revelo is taking the friction out of hiring the best technical talent in Latin America. The company says that their pool of 300,000 pre-vetted technologists includes some of the top developers in the region.
For companies, the advantages abound: This talent is aligned with US time zones, the hiring process is quick and smooth, and they don’t have to worry about payroll and compliance. There are also a wide range of benefits for the talent, including that American companies offer more compensation than their Latin American counterparts, while also often providing more enticing projects.
Lachlan de Crespigny is at the helm of Revelo. The Australian native first landed in the Americas when he was a BCG consultant on assignment in Brazil. He then headed to New York to undertake an MBA at Columbia. “That was a really interesting time in tech,” de Crespigny told Refresh Miami. “Uber and Airbnb were just starting to take over the world. And it became really obvious that there was going to be a tidal wave of tech.”
In early conversations with his co-founder-to-be, Lucas Mendes, de Crespigny began to realize that accompanying this tech boom would be a need for software talent. Spending some time in Mendes’ home country of Brazil cemented the idea in their mind to build what would eventually become Revelo.
The market has changed since 2015, when the duo founded Revelo, de Crespigny noted. “It’s been really interesting to see how people have shifted away from thinking about going to Latin America to save costs. Now they tell us their budget and ask us to find the best 10 candidates that are available for the particular job – no matter where they live.”
“The shift is from thinking about costs to thinking about accessing 600 million more people,” continued de Crespigny. “That has led to a lot of success for many of those companies.” This mirrors the exponentially-growing tech ecosystem in Latin America overall.
Revelo works with companies of all sizes – from startups to multinational enterprises. Companies can hire one developer or a whole team. Their engineers can work in a wide variety of program languages, including Python, React, JavaScript, and C++.
De Crespigny landed in Miami during the pandemic and hasn’t looked back. “Miami saw the opportunity during the pandemic to welcome tech businesses, and they understood that when tech businesses grow in a city, that brings benefits to the rest of the city.”
“That positive, business-friendly attitude is a really magical thing,” he continued. While the team is fully-remote, a handful of Revelo’s 300 employees are based in South Florida.
So far, Revelo has raised $33.7 million from a wide range of investors, including Social Capital, FJLabs, Valor Capital Group, and the World Bank’s IFC (International Finance Corporation). This funding has been used to develop Revelo’s platform, which aims to fill knowledge-worker roles significantly faster than traditional recruiters.
Going forward, de Crespigny said that he is excited to see the remote hiring trend continue. He noted that many companies start by hiring remote workers before hiring outside of their home state and then internationally. “We can see a whole bunch of new companies that are hiring across the States,” he asserted. “Soon they will start hiring from Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil as well. It’s at the point of becoming mainstream.”
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