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About us

We're here to fix hiring

Potential over Credential

★★★★★ 5.0 VERIFIED SKILLS Reliability Calm Speed Teamwork Peer-validated · 3 employers 1.2 km away Bình Thạnh
The problem

Every interview ever conducted has been forgotten.

A manager meets someone. They see it: the calm under pressure, the reliability, the instinct. They make a decision.

And then that observation dies. Stays in their head. Never shared, never passed on. The next employer starts from zero.


The most valuable signal in hiring is what a real employer observed. In practice. Under pressure. It has never been recorded or carried forward. We built Talential to change that.

Talent comes from the street

— Gwen Cheylan, CEO & Founder

The person working the floor, showing up every day, holding it together when it gets hard — they carry skills the market doesn't know how to read. We're building the memory.

How we got here

10 years in the making

Talential didn't start in 2026. It started with a question that wouldn't go away: why is it so hard to find the right person?

But the more we looked, the more we saw the other side. The person waiting for a callback that never comes. Sending applications into silence. Starting over every time, as if the work they did before never happened.

Hiring is broken for everyone in the room.

2016
Bangkok, Thailand
"Can you do a latte?"

The first version: match workers to jobs through photos and real signals, not resumes. It never launched. The question it was asking never went away.

2019 – 2021
Ho Chi Minh City
Yegg: cracking recruitment open

Two years of research, conversations, failed pitches. Investors laughed. We continued. Yegg taught us what didn't work. And what the market couldn't see yet.

2021 – 2022
Ho Chi Minh City
MayoMayo: the soft skill problem

One question: how do you measure soft skills? We studied every platform, every psychometric test. Found them all flawed. Soft skills aren't absolute. They're relative to context, relationship, moment. We threw the tests out.

2023
The aha moment
The ledger didn't exist.

What if instead of testing soft skills, we captured what employers were already observing? Every manager had real, honest observations. None of it was ever written down or passed on.

Hiring isn't broken because of bad tools. It's broken because it has no memory. We decided to build the ledger.

Late 2023 – 2024
Watching the shift
Deliberate patience

ChatGPT arrived. Instead of rushing, we stopped. We spent the next two years studying how AI would actually be adopted inside real companies: not as a feature, but as the foundation.

How do you design a business that is truly data-driven and AI-native from the ground up? We needed to know the answer before we built anything.

Late 2025
Ho Chi Minh City
Talential: ready

By late 2025, we were ready. We had rebuilt our product thinking and development process around AI: not as a bolt-on, but as the core.

Then we assembled the team, one by one. Andrew, Rebecca, and the rest, drawn to the same vision.

Because this was never just a job platform. It's a movement.

The people behind it

A team built around a mission.

What we're building

The infrastructure that turns potential into opportunity.

Investors

Be part of what comes next.

We are building the talent infrastructure Southeast Asia has never had. A portable, peer-validated reputation layer that finally works for the people doing the work. If that mission resonates, we'd love to talk.

Talk to us →