Africa is the focus of Breedj, a global talent marketplace driven by AI
Breedj, an AI-powered global talent marketplace with an emphasis on Africa, helps businesses hire, manage, and compensate remote workers across borders while giving talented African professionals access to opportunities abroad. Breedj is a platform that integrates payroll, compliance, remote readiness assessment, and talent sourcing.
John Benatouil of Mauritius, who co-founded Breedj with Nicolas Goldstein of Morocco, told Disrupt Africa, “Our differentiator is not just matching CVs to jobs, but ensuring talents are operational, autonomous, and ready to work remotely from day one.”
Customer service, virtual help, IT, data, finance, operations, legal support, and back-office tasks are among the jobs we concentrate on that can be completed remotely. Our stance increasingly includes AI-augmented roles. Talenteum, a platform established in Africa to link local talent with foreign enterprises, evolved into Breedj.
“We decided to rebuild the model as a scalable, AI-driven marketplace after operating employer-of-record and remote hiring services for a number of years,” Benatouil stated.
Following a strategic shift spurred by involvement in global initiatives like the Stanford Seed Transformation Program, the startup was fully organized in 2024. According to Benatouil, two significant gaps have been found. Global talent is what businesses seek, not complication or danger. According to him, current platforms either concentrate on enterprise EOR solutions that are costly and inflexible or on freelancing without quality control.
“African talent is talented, but their exposure to international hiring standards is limited.” Despite having great technical abilities, many professionals and grads lack access, exposure, or validation from remote-first organizations.
Breedj addresses these two problems by positioning itself between enterprise EOR players like Deel, Papaya, and Rippling and freelance platforms like Upwork and Fiverr.
According to Benatouil, “Breedj is more accessible and impact-driven than enterprise EOR solutions, and more structured and compliant than freelance marketplaces.” “What sets us apart is our emphasis on Africa, employability, and AI-enabled matching.”
Breedj has already expanded its operations throughout several African nations, including Mauritius, Madagascar, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, and Rwanda. It is currently bootstrapped and built on the profits from its services. Additionally, it supports multinational corporations in Europe, the United Kingdom (UK), and other regions.
Benatouil stated, “Uptake has been strong and consistent, driven largely by factors such as talent shortages in Europe, the rising cost of local hiring, and the increased acceptance of remote and distributed teams.”
The need for skill is really great. In addition to gig employment, many African professionals are actively looking for long-term, organized international possibilities. Customer operations, support, virtual help, IT, and business services are areas where we observe very high traction.
Plans for expansion include expanding the platform to enable more self-serve hiring by businesses, adding additional AI-augmented roles, and expanding coverage in East and West Africa. Breedj is a subscription-based business strategy, managing monthly fees for each talent.
Benatouil stated, “This generates recurring revenue, which is a crucial component of our long-term strategy as we move toward a SaaS-first model.” “Revenues are recurring and growing, and profitability is gradually built as the platform scales, even though we are still in a growth phase.”
