EQT-backed Talentium On Why Hiring Still “Sucks”

Stockholm’s VC circles have been unusually aligned on one point this year. 

Everyone keeps talking about Talentium. The company is 22-year-old Sebastian Hjärne’s third startup, backed by EQT Ventures, Klarna’s Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Sana’s Joel Hellermark, and VOI’s Fredrik Hjelm.

Talentium is building an AI-first hiring platform that combines a deep search engine with automated sourcing, profiling, interview prep, and workflow orchestration. It has already won over teams at Google, Klarna, EQT, Voi, Renasens, Kleer, and others.

Sebastian is not a newcomer. He sold his first startup at 19 and built another before launching Talentium. He taught himself to code, market, and ship products long before finishing school. His pitch to young founders is simple: start before you feel ready.

Talentium is now growing fast with a global team. Recruiters call it a high-agency upgrade for the whole hiring cycle. Investors call it one of the most interesting early bets in the Nordics this year.

We sat down with Sebastian to talk speed, distribution, conviction, and why hiring has been broken for years.

Q&A - Sebastian Hjärne, Founder & CEO of Talentium

This is your third company at 22. What made the pain of hiring so strong that you decided to build Talentium?

Because I felt the pain myself. Three times. Hiring was always the bottleneck. Not revenue, not product, not customers. Just finding the right people fast enough. Every tool I used was built for admin, not for discovery. It made no sense that you could search the internet in milliseconds, but searching for talent took weeks. Talentium started from frustration: “Why does this still suck?”

Talentium’s search engine is simple on paper. Yet top VCs call it one of the most impressive demos they’ve seen. What makes it work this well?

Because it understands people. Not just keywords.

We built an engine that can read context, skills, seniority and industry patterns. So when you search for “product manager who can own zero-to-one,” it actually knows what that means.

That’s the magic: super complex technology, explained simply, and experienced like a tool you know.

You’ve said AI is not the center of the product. What’s the real edge: the agent, the search, or the workflow?

The edge is orchestration.

AI is powerful, but useless unless it solves actual problem. Talentium’s advantage is that the search, the agent, and the workflow reinforce each other. It feels like one system, not three features stitched together.

Your backers include Siemiatkowski, Hellermark, and Hjelm. What did they challenge you on most?

Focus and velocity.

They all asked versions of: “What will you say no to and how fast will you learn?”

It pushed us to stay extremely narrow and competitive: one problem, one type of customer, one category. That discipline is why we’ve moved as fast as we have.

You built and sold your first startup at 19. What did that exit teach you about building teams and dealing with investors?

The exit taught me one thing: everything starts with talent. If you don’t have the right people, nothing else matters — not strategy, not capital, not even the idea. This is why we are building Talentium

You often talk about “start before you feel ready.” What’s a moment at Talentium where that changed the outcome?

When we launched search publicly after four months. It wasn’t perfect. But customers used it, broke it, and taught us 10x more than any internal testing could. That launch accelerated the entire product roadmap.

Talentium has an unusually high hit rate with early adopters. How did you break through the noise?

We didn’t pitch AI. We solved a problem in a huge market. Everyone in hiring is drowning in tools. But nobody helped them find talent. Once people saw that Talentium actually delivered candidates, everything else became noise. With the help of AI we want hiring to become more human focus on what matters connect with talents.  Results cut through markets better than branding.

Recruiters worry about being automated away. You argue the opposite. What’s the recruiter’s job in five years?

Recruiters become relationship architects. AI will handle sourcing, screening, scheduling and admin (the manual parts of the process. Humans will spend their time doing what machines can’t get to know the people behind the resumes. Talentium’s mission is to give them more time for that, not less.

You run very fast. How do you keep product quality high while shipping weekly?

Shipping fast is easy. Shipping fast with quality is about discipline. We ship in small slices, we measure everything, and we fix issues immediately. Quality doesn’t slow you down,  lack of ownership does.

Hardest product decision so far, and what did it teach you about saying no?

The hardest decision has been saying no to building things the way they’ve “always been done.”

Customers often ask for features that look like the tools they already use. It’s tempting to copy the familiar—because it feels safe, and it wins quick deals.

But we believe hiring needs to be reinvented, not recreated.

Talentium is already used in Japan. What surprised you most about expanding outside Europe this early?

How universal the hiring problem is. Different cultures, same bottleneck. Finding the right people. The workflows differ, but the pain is identical. That gave us a lot of confidence in the global potential.

What’s next: deeper AI agents, new markets, or a full-stack hiring suite?

The future lies in a world where work and talent find each other naturally.

Where people aren’t filtered by titles or CVs, but by what they can truly create.

A world where companies grow because the right people appear at the right time  without the chase, without the noise.