Talentium: The 22-Year-Old Founder Reimagining Recruitment with AI

Sebastian Hjärne has taken a bet on speed, bold ideas, and the belief that AI can do more than just assist in hiring. It can overhaul the entire engine. The Stockholm-based startup has already drawn serious attention, raising €3.5 million in pre-seed funding from EQT Ventures and pulling in heavyweight angels like Klarna’s Sebastian Siemiatkowski and Sana’s Joel Hellermark.

But what really turns heads is that over 1,000 companies signed up to Talentium’s waitlist with nothing spent on marketing. Not even one Swedish krona. No paid ads. No agency retainer. Just product, word of mouth, and a market which appears to be actively on the lookout for smarter recruiting.

In a space filled with legacy tools and sluggish workflows, Talentium reads like a response to a decade of collective recruiter frustration. The platform runs on a proprietary AI engine built to search the web for talent: not just scraping LinkedIn profiles, but parsing GitHub, personal portfolios, and obscure corners of the internet; recruiters type prompts in natural language, and Talentium delivers results in seconds. Think 'Find a machine learning engineer in Berlin with experience at a unicorn' and you're off to the races. And it doesn't stop at search. The system automates job post creation, candidate matching, pipeline tracking, and even scheduling. That leaves just one manual step: conducting the interview. Everything else is handled by AI.

What’s striking is that Talentium isn’t selling efficiency at the cost of connection. The platform was born out of Hjärne’s frustration with cold, transactional hiring processes while building his previous companies. His vision? "Every person at the right place."

It’s aspirational, sure, but it speaks to a deeper truth in recruitment.

Cultural fit, motivation, personal growth: those aren’t checkbox data points. Talentium’s system integrates signals that go beyond titles and employers, surfacing candidates based on growth trajectories, side projects, and industry relevance in real time. Profiles update automatically as people switch jobs or learn new skills. That real-time layer is a game-changer in a field where static databases and outdated resumes are still the norm.

Recruitment tech is overdue for a shakeup. Many startups have tried to chip away at one slice of the funnel. For instance, sourcing, ATS integration, candidate engagement; but Talentium is attacking the full stack. It's an end-to-end system wrapped in a sleek interface that even non-technical hiring managers can use... the numbers speak for themselves.

Clients like Brightmill cut hiring costs by 70%. Zellify landed a world-class engineer in under a week. Kleer, formerly PE Accounting, has accelerated its hiring of Java developers dramatically, thanks to direct outreach and sourcing from within the same tool.

The team behind the curtain is global and tight-knit. Spread across continents from San Francisco to Fukuoka, Talentium’s team are a mix of engineers, product thinkers, and former recruiters. Notably, the company uses its own tech to hire (a practice Hjärne calls "drinking our own champagne"). That loop fuels product development with real-world feedback, keeping the pace fast and user-informed.

Investors are clearly bought in, but the angels backing Talentium bring more than money. Klarna’s Siemiatkowski said the product demo was "one of the coolest things" he’d seen, which, considering his track record, isn’t a throwaway compliment. Then there’s Joel Hellermark from Sana Labs, Fredrik Hjelm from Voi, and Robin Haak, who’s worked the recruiting side both as a founder and a VC.

But market potential is where this story really lifts. Recruitment isn’t a niche problem. It’s a pain point that spans startups, corporates, and everything in between. Globally, the recruiting tech space is valued in the billions of dollars, yet innovation has lagged. Manual processes dominate. Platforms silo key tasks. Data decays in a matter of months. Talentium’s bet is that AI, built properly, can do better... much better. And the timing works in their favor. As economic pressure mounts, companies are cutting back on bloated HR functions and leaning into automation.

That’s the wave Talentium is riding, and they seem to be killing it.

Hjärne, for his part, isn’t interested in building a feature or a widget. He’s playing for standards. He talks about making Talentium the default for how companies find people and how people find purpose. Big words, but so far, the follow-through has been there. The next version of the platform, set to roll out later this year, promises fewer features but more impact, a "more human" interface designed to elevate both recruiter and candidate experience.

Talentium isn’t trying to patch up the old way of hiring. It's building the new one. And for the first time in a while, it actually feels like recruitment might catch up with the rest of tech. Not bad for a 22-year-old.