Stockholm Startup Fika Jobs Raises $4M to Replace Resumes with AI-Conducted Video Interviews

What Fika Jobs Actually Built

Fika Jobs is a Stockholm-based startup trying to fix something that is genuinely broken. The modern hiring funnel is a mess: candidates submit resumes into automated screening systems, get filtered out by keyword-matching algorithms, and receive form rejections weeks later. According to TechCrunch, generative AI has made this worse, not better, by giving employers tools to process more applications faster while giving candidates even less feedback.

Fika's answer is a video-first platform powered by AI interview agents. A candidate connects their LinkedIn profile, Fika's AI reviews their background, generates personalized interview questions, and conducts a roughly 10-minute video interview. The system is currently running on Google's Gemini models. After the interview, the platform auto-edits responses into short video clips and builds a browsable profile, which TechCrunch describes as something between LinkedIn and TikTok.

The candidate doesn't re-apply for every job. They maintain one live profile that employers can discover and revisit over time.

The Problem It's Solving Is Real

Co-founders Jakob Dubois (CEO) and Alexander Dubois (CTO) — brothers — came to this idea while running a previous startup called Gaff, a social app. Jakob told TechCrunch they nearly passed on a strong hire because his resume was unremarkable. When they actually spoke with him, the candidate's drive was obvious within minutes. Their conclusion: the traits employers often care most about — grit, communication, presence — don't transfer to paper.

Plenty of hiring managers would say the same thing. Early-career candidates and people from non-traditional backgrounds especially tend to get filtered out by resume screens that reward credential presentation over actual ability.

The $4 Million Round and What It Buys

Fika announced the pre-seed raise this week. According to TechCrunch, the funds will go toward continued platform development, growing the team, and preparing for a wider launch later this year. The round was led by Luminar Ventures, with participation from Alliance VC and King co-founders Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi, best known for creating Candy Crush.

The company is entering a crowded space. TechCrunch identifies Alex, Maki, and Mercor as competitors. Fika's claimed differentiation: most rivals focus on helping employers source and screen candidates more efficiently. Fika is building from the candidate side — a standing pool of pre-interviewed people that employers browse, rather than a pipeline that processes inbound applicants.

More than 100 companies are on the waitlist, according to the founders, though they declined to disclose which ones. More than 50 companies have tested the platform, including Plenty Labs, SICS.ai, Kognity, and Rebtel. The platform is free for job seekers. Employers pay nothing up front, but Fika takes 10% of a candidate's first-year salary upon a successful hire — lower than the 20% to 30% placement fees often charged by traditional recruiters, the company notes.

Whether Fika's candidate-first distinction survives contact with enterprise HR buyers is an open question.

The Bias Problem Deserves a Direct Answer, Not a Footnote

The strongest legitimate concern about Fika's model deserves direct statement. When an employer browses a video profile, they see the candidate's face, apparent age, race, gender, accent, and physical presentation before reviewing a single qualification. Traditional resume screening is bad, but it is at least partially obscuring on these dimensions — which is why some companies have moved toward blind resume screening, as TechCrunch notes. Video introduces new surface area for the exact biases that hiring discrimination law exists to address.

Fika's counter-argument, implied in TechCrunch's reporting, is that communication skills and personality are themselves legitimate job criteria, and that AI-conducted interviews apply consistent questions across all candidates. If the AI applies uniform criteria rather than leaving evaluation to an interviewer's gut, the process could be less biased than a phone screen with a busy recruiter.

But the AI's scoring criteria matter enormously here. If the model is trained on data reflecting historical hiring decisions, it could encode existing biases about what "good" communication looks and sounds like. TechCrunch's reporting does not detail how Fika's AI scores candidate responses or what safeguards are in place. Any enterprise HR department evaluating the platform will have to answer for it under EEOC guidelines, and in Europe, under GDPR and the EU AI Act.

The Meritocracy Angle

The core premise here is sound: hire people who can actually do the job, not people who write the best resumes. A resume is a marketing document. A 10-minute structured video interview, even with an AI, captures something closer to actual performance. For candidates who didn't go to a name-brand school or who changed careers, that's a genuine opportunity.

The catch is that "video presence" can itself be a privilege. Someone with a quiet apartment, decent lighting, and a good webcam will present better than someone in a noisy shared space shooting on a phone. That's not a reason to reject the model, but it's a design problem Fika will need to address if the platform is going to deliver on its promise for non-traditional candidates specifically.

What Comes Next

According to TechCrunch, the platform plans to open early access to candidates this week, with a broader public launch expected this fall. The company will initially focus on Sweden before expanding internationally. Fika currently has a small team but expects to reach around 10 employees by the end of the year. The EU AI Act's requirements for high-risk AI systems — which include AI used in employment decisions — are actively enforced, and any platform operating in Europe will face compliance obligations around transparency and human oversight of automated hiring decisions. How Fika structures that oversight will be one of the first concrete tests of whether the product holds up beyond the pitch.