Milwaukee staffing startup LatinoPro Inc. is raising a $180,000 seed round to develop and launch its web platform.
The round was launched Nov. 10 and is expected to close within 60 days. So far, about $60,000 has been raised and the other $120,000 is committed, said co-founder and chief executive officer Benjamin Morales. The total raise is expected to come from three investors.
LatinoPro was co-founded in 2016 by Morales, David Soya and Adam Bakken. It offers professional Latino and Spanish-speaking recruitment to Milwaukee-area companies. The idea came out of an entrepreneurship class Morales took at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and he developed it via the university’s Launch Pad student startup accelerator.
The funding will also be used for sales and marketing so the budding firm can recruit job candidates to create profiles on its site. LatinoPro will post job listings on its site and then use artificial intelligence tools to suggest listings to the appropriate candidates. A LatinoPro employee will then choose the best candidates from the applicant pool and present those to employer clients, Morales said.
“We’ve identified that the corporations, they’ve understood now that the Latino demographic has enormous buying power and they need salesmen on the ground to really navigate those diverse demographics,” he said. “By us being able to provide people that not only speak fluent Spanish and English, but also are professional and have degrees and accreditation, we’re really turning into a resource for them.”
LatinoPro has about 14 employer clients and is currently filling about 200 job openings within a 60-mile radius of Milwaukee.
The company moved into an office space at the Ward4 co-working community a couple of weeks ago. The founders are the sole employees.
