Potential over Credential
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gwen CheylanFifteen years building platforms. Fifteen years hiring people the same way: by meeting them, spending time with them, figuring out what makes them good. Not what their CV says.
He built Talential because he was tired of watching great people get overlooked by a system that never saw them.
Andrew SchwabeAndrew has a PhD in AI. He approaches every system the way a craftsman would: carefully, without shortcuts, focused on what actually works. Years spent building AI systems for real behavioral data.
When we needed someone to build the intelligence behind Talential, there was only one call to make.
Rebecca JoyRebecca is Head of Finance and Data Science, and CEO of Saigon AI. We have worked together for years, long enough to understand how broken the information layer behind hiring really is.
She brings the rigour and the real-world experience to make sure the numbers hold up.
Quynh VoQuynh streamlines the back office so everything else can move fast. Processes, documents, operations. She makes them clean, reliable, and invisible in the best way.
Experience across sales, supply chain, and sustainability. If it needs to run smoothly, she's already on it.
Nathanael OhanaNath tests everything. Every AI tool that comes out, he is already inside it, figuring out how it fits into a real business workflow.
Not just data-driven. Data-driven and AI-assisted. He is building the workflows to make that real.
Uyen NguyenUyen has taste. The kind you can't teach. She built the visual language of Talential, and now she's applying that same eye and instinct to product.
A designer who thinks like a PM. She shapes how Talential looks, feels, and works. From first impression to last interaction.
Phuc SourcePhuc believes deep human connections accelerate people. Not as a theory. As something he lives every day.
He is building the community layer of Talential from the ground up. Focused on mutual growth between talents and businesses. Café by café, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, university by university.
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.
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