In this episode, we sit down with Alex Epure, co-founder and CEO of Qureos, an AI-powered hiring platform that's just raised a $5M seed round led by Prosus. Alex spent nine years at Cisco, moved to Dubai, and then went from managing global enterprise accounts to launching Saudi Arabia for Swvl during COVID. What started as a passion project helping university graduates land their first job has since evolved into a full-stack hiring infrastructure layer integrated with over 2,400 sourcing channels globally.

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.

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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

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Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/56d08ca6/transcript.txt

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https://www.qureos.com/

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