Listen or watch now on
YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts
In this episode, we sit down with Alex Epure, co-founder and CEO of Qureos, an AI-powered hiring platform that sits at the centre of the recruitment workflow, integrated with over 2,400 sourcing channels globally.
A month ago, Qureos closed a $5M seed round co-led by Prosus Ventures and Salica Oryx Fund, with participation from Oraseya Capital, PlusVC, F6 Ventures, BDev Ventures, Sunny Side Venture Partners, and Daniel Tyre (an early HubSpot executive who helped scale the company to IPO), alongside follow-on investment from COTU Ventures and Globivest.
Alex spent nine years at Cisco, moved from Sweden to Dubai, and then went from managing global enterprise accounts to launching Saudi Arabia for Swvl during COVID. Along the way, a side project mentoring university students in Knowledge Village turned into something much bigger.
But what started as a platform helping graduates demonstrate their skills and land their first job has since evolved into a full-stack hiring infrastructure layer that's now pushing into mid-market and enterprise.
Alex is sharp, refreshingly candid about the mistakes he's made along the way, and has a genuinely interesting perspective on what the future of recruitment looks like in an AI world.
We cover:
Why hiring has never been easier and is still fundamentally broken, and why more tools and more platforms haven't solved the problem.
The 1AM Sheraton lobby conversation that convinced his co-founder Usama to join, and what it's like building a company through a market that changed three times in one year.
Why their AI chatbot experiment completely flopped, and what they built instead.
How Qureos built a nationality and gender prediction engine to solve a hiring compliance problem that's unique to this region.
Why 9% of AI interviews still end with the candidate wanting to talk to a human, and what that tells you about the future of recruitment.
Why the real job displacement isn't AI itself, it's the person who can do your job and three others at the same time.
How raising a seed round led by Prosus involved a live tech pilot with operating companies, and why failing it would have killed the deal entirely.
Timestamps
00:00 - Introduction
02:00 - How the $5M Prosus Round Came Together
05:00 - What Qureos Does
08:00 - Nine Years at Cisco & the Move to Dubai
13:00 - Joining Swvl & Thriving in Chaos
16:00 - The 1AM Sheraton Lobby That Changed Everything
22:00 - Going Full-Time in the Worst Market Imaginable
27:00 - First AI Experiments & Why the Pivot Was Perfectly Timed
30:00 - Why Their AI Chatbot Completely Flopped
37:00 - The Business Model: Platform vs Managed Services
40:00 - The AI Adoption Gap: MENA vs the US
43:00 - Job Displacement & Why Your Replacement Won't Be a Robot
Subscribe to the show
I’d love it if you’d subscribe and share the show. Your support makes all the difference as we try to bring more curious minds into the conversation.
For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
