BetterPlace Acquires Malaysia-Based HRTech Startup TROOPERS

SaaS startup BetterPlace has acquired Malaysia-based recruitment and job placement startup TROOPERS to accelerate its presence in Southeast Asia.

With this acquisition, TROOPERS will integrate its product offering into BetterPlace’s comprehensive SaaS platform. 

The development comes after BetterPlace acquired blue collar workforce fulfillment platform MyRobin for an undisclosed amount in February.

Founded in 2015 by Pravin Agarwala and Uday Singh, BetterPlace is a workforce management platform. It offers background verification, hiring, onboarding, upskilling and productivity management services.

BetterPlace’s B2C platform Rocket primarily works with enterprises and helps them upskill the frontline workers to make them job-ready. The platform also provides enterprises an access to pre-trained frontline workforce.

“Southeast Asia is expected to see a significant growth in demand for gig workers in the next five years, with the gig economy growing by 31% since 2017, well ahead of the growth in conventional workforce. In Malaysia alone, 84% of hiring managers prefer hiring gig-workers,” said Pravin Agarwala, cofounder and Group CEO, BetterPlace.

The startup claims to have boarded more than 30 Mn workers on its platform. It also counts over 1,100 companies as its clientele. 

So far, BetterPlace secured over $91 Mn funding. It counts Jungle Ventures, Unitus Ventures, British International Investment, 3one4 Capital and CX Partners as its investors.

Meanwhile, TROOPERS was founded in 2017 by Joshua Tan and Kelvin Lee. The HRTech platform helps businesses find gig workers on its platform.

“Majority of the gig workforce in Southeast Asia is informal, making it difficult for workers to discover supplementary jobs or increase their earning potential. Additionally, workers may not have necessary skills to match growing enterprise requirements. Building on the principles of transparency, accountability, and legitimacy, we started TROOPERS to address talent shortage and workforce productivity for enterprises while creating better livelihoods for workers in Malaysia,” said, Joshua Tan, cofounder and CEO of TROOPERS.

The startup claims to have registered more than 180K verified workers and recorded over 200,000 shifts (working hours), which are taken by registered gig workers from its mobile app. TROOPERS also asserts that it has provided work to more than 50K gig workers to date. 

Over the years, BetterPlace has made several acquisitions to strengthen its business model. In 2020 and 2021, it bought Fabulyst, Oust Labs, OLX People Waah Jobs. In 2022 and 2023, it acquired OkayGo, ezeDox and MyRobin.id.