HUNTR Revolutionizes Cross-Border Blue-Collar Hiring with AI-Powered Three-Sided Marketplace

"Large enterprises in the Middle East hire in high volumes of workforce—which is different to one-off hirings. So for white-collar jobs you have LinkedIn, and for one-off blue-collar jobs you have a platform like Indeed. But when it comes to high volume hiring, and I'm talking about 300 to 500 people on a monthly basis, you don't have platforms." This massive gap in the recruitment technology landscape, identified by Samuel Joy Cherian, Co-founder of HUNTR, reveals a fundamental problem affecting millions of migrant blue-collar workers across Asia and Africa.

Cherian's AI-driven three-sided marketplace is transforming how enterprises in the Middle East hire blue-collar and gray-collar workers by eliminating exploitation, streamlining documentation, and providing unprecedented transparency in cross-border recruitment. His journey from leading digital transformation at Emirates Group's manpower division—managing 86,000+ migrant workers—to building a startup solving the very problems he witnessed firsthand offers crucial insights into the future of global labor mobility.

The conversation reveals how a first-time entrepreneur from Trivandrum, India, is bringing order to the chaos of cross-border blue-collar hiring through AI-powered technology, regulatory expertise, and an ecosystem approach that prioritizes human flourishing over extraction.

From Trivandrum to Dubai: The Origin Story

Cherian's journey began in Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala, where he attended St. Thomas School before studying at VIT in Tamil Nadu. "Ten years back I moved to Dubai right after university," he recalls, starting his career with the Emirates Group's manpower division.

Emirates Airlines is known globally, but the broader Emirates Group represents a massive conglomerate. "Emirates is a very large group. I started with the Manpower division which started with the aviation sector, went on to multiple different sectors, has over 86,000 plus migrant blue-collar workers in that company," Cherian explains.

His role involved leading large digital transformation projects for this workforce—giving him unparalleled insight into the challenges of managing migrant labor at scale. "I was actually to be honest in a very comfortable position, getting my paycheck on a month-to-month basis, fortunate to be recognized by senior management, working closely with the managing director," he admits.

The Problem Discovery: Inside Emirates Group

The idea for HUNTR emerged organically from Cherian's work at Emirates. "When I discovered the problem, the company actually wanted to invest in the product and wanted it to be a companywide product," he shares. "I was very excited about it and realized this would be a game changer."

But corporate reality set in. "One of the challenges in the corporate environment is that there are a lot of layers, getting approvals, there are vested interests. Six months went down just like a blink of an eye," Cherian recalls. "I realized this particular product would not probably work through a corporate venture program or corporate incubation. It would be better to start it off as a startup itself because a startup has its own advantages—being lean and moving really fast."

The Problem: Exploitation in the Migrant Worker Supply Chain

The core problem HUNTR addresses is systemic and severe. "Typically this is done through legacy systems. Companies work through recruitment agencies back in the home country across Asia and Africa to bring in workforce," Cherian explains.

Because there are multiple players involved—brokers, sub-agencies, intermediaries—"there's a lot of inefficiencies created in the process, a lot of misinformation, a lot of coordination." The consequences for migrant workers are devastating:

Information Asymmetry: Workers don't get accurate information about the job they're being hired for.

Financial Burden: Workers take on debt to pay recruitment fees, often based on false promises.

Job Mismatch: The actual job differs significantly from what was promised.

High Attrition: Workers quit when reality doesn't match expectations, creating costs for enterprises.

The Human Cost of Broken Systems

Cherian witnessed firsthand the human impact of these failures. "Migrant blue-collar workers who went through that process, some do at times get exploited. One, they don't get the right information about the job. They are also in financial burden—they take on financial burdens. They are also unhappy with the job. There's very high attrition of workforce."

This attrition isn't just a human tragedy—it's a business problem. "This is a common challenge which we've seen with a lot of large enterprises that the attrition in workforce is really high, and that is because of the supply chain issues which is found in hiring migrant blue-collar workers by large enterprises."

The Solution: From Two-Sided to Three-Sided Marketplace

HUNTR's approach evolved significantly from initial concept. "The product which we have right now is very different to what it was initially conceptualized for. I believe that's the journey of a startup—you pivot, you improve, you learn a lot especially by executing," Cherian explains.

The initial concept was a simple two-sided marketplace: "Just like LinkedIn or any job marketplace out there, we created a technology platform, we created an Android app for both the company and for the migrant blue workers."

But when they went to market, critical scalability challenges emerged. "We came across challenges. Predominantly one of the challenges is that we're working with migrant blue-collar workers, and a lot of them are not educated. Things like uploading certain documentation for their visas and onboarding process—they were not done on time. As a result, operations teams from an enterprise perspective, their projects get delayed."

The Three-Sided Marketplace Architecture

The pivot to a three-sided model was transformative. "We discovered that a third piece is very important, which is the service providers. These are vetted service providers—they can be training organizations, recruitment agencies, and also government institutions who have access to hundreds and thousands of blue-collar workers back in the home country," Cherian explains.

"We empower them with technology to ensure that a lot of the labor-intensive processes are digitized, and there's transparency in the process, the speed, and efficiency in terms of the work that they do."

This architecture solves the fundamental challenges: service providers handle the on-ground complexity (documentation, verification, training) while HUNTR's platform ensures transparency, efficiency, and data flow between all parties.

Navigating Cross-Border Regulatory Complexity

Cross-border recruitment involves navigating complex regulatory frameworks across multiple countries. "Each country has their own regulatory frameworks in terms of sending people from their country, especially in volume, to another country," Cherian acknowledges.

HUNTR's strategy was highly focused: "One is first thing which we had to look at was which industry do we really laser in on. There's multiple industries involved. We zoned in on healthcare workers—especially post-COVID, healthcare workers were very high in demand."

Second was country focus: "You don't want to be all over the place because exactly for the reason which you mentioned that each country has their own regulatory frameworks. We chose India, and India has its own—India is also far more advanced when it comes to sending workforce abroad compared to a lot of other Asian and African countries."

From Manual Execution to Systemized Processes

Cherian applied Y Combinator's famous "do things that don't scale" principle to regulatory learning. "When we started out, a lot of the processes—we did a lot of things manually and learned a lot of the regulatory frameworks as well. But an important piece is translating that learning into a digital or systemizing that process."

This approach—executing manually first, then systemizing—allowed HUNTR to build deep regulatory expertise before automating. "We understood what that process looks like by doing things manually, but then we started digitizing those processes."

Beyond Marketplace: Documentation and Demand Forecasting

As HUNTR aggregated service providers and enterprises, Cherian identified adjacent problems that needed solving. "One of the advantages you get to see a lot of other opportunities especially when you're building marketplaces. When aggregating service providers and aggregating large enterprises, we also saw how the documentation process is also broken."

The Documentation Challenge: "A lot of the companies don't even use any type of platform when it comes to documentation. You have first generational tools like SAP and Oracle, but they're not meant for high volume recruiting. You have spreadsheets, but spreadsheets have limitations in high volume hiring and documentation process."

HUNTR built a dedicated documentation platform to streamline this. Then came data-driven insights: "We also realized that we are getting a lot of data—when it comes to the type of jobs which are being hired, the type of investments which are going into the Middle East, what that translates into job opportunities from a demand perspective."

AI-Powered Documentation Automation

The documentation challenge is massive. "On average, about different companies require different types of documentation in order to issue their visa and for compliance purposes. An average would be like around 10 documentation per migrant blue-collar worker," Cherian explains.

"Companies which are hiring let's say about 5,000 migrant blue-collar workers would be then having to deal with like 50,000 documentations. The surprising bit is like companies are not using any software. A lot of these documentation are collected manually first of all."

HUNTR's solution leverages agentic AI: "Now we are using AI. Agentic AI bots can help—instead of uploading the documentation directly onto all these individual documents per migrant blue-collar worker in order to get their visas issued, you still need a person to upload those documents. The agentic AI kind of eliminates that manual cumbersome process where they upload the right documentation at the right place, which saves a lot of time."

Demand Forecasting: Proactive vs Reactive Hiring

HUNTR's demand forecasting transforms enterprises from reactive to proactive. "The industry which we are focused on right now is infrastructure because everything else is connected to infrastructure. Any investment which goes into infrastructure investment, we monitor that, and the platform basically essentially breaks it down to what those positions look like and what are the job opportunities which comes out from those investments."

On the supply side, HUNTR has unique data advantages: "Because we have data into the different countries that are being hired from—in terms of locations, in terms of skill set, in terms of timelines—a pipeline can be created, and you can look into what that pipeline looks like from Asia and Africa."

The Ecosystem Strategy: Post-Hiring Partnerships

Cherian is clear about HUNTR's focus: "The pre-employment space or the pre-hiring space especially is where there are not many technology players, and it is also a difficult problem. The advantage of having a difficult problem is that when you succeed in building solutions for the difficult problem and when you scale, that's your biggest moat because that becomes your market barrier to entry."

But HUNTR isn't ignoring post-hiring opportunities—it's pursuing an ecosystem strategy. "All our efforts and unit efforts go into the pre-hiring space and solving that particular space. The leverage which we have is we have the candidates who are onboarded on our platform—our cost of acquisition is very less compared to other players who want to acquire those users."

Rather than building post-hiring products internally, HUNTR partners with specialized players:

The Platform Play: Enable Others, Don't Build Everything

"You can't build all of this. What we are building is basically an ecosystem for other players to come in and partner with us so that they can really plug into our ecosystem and then offer their services to the migrant workers," Cherian explains.

This platform strategy is brilliant: HUNTR focuses on the hard, defensible pre-hiring problem (recruitment, documentation, compliance) while partnering with specialists for post-hiring services (career coaching, remittances, communities). The company owns the customer relationship and acquisition channel, enabling others to plug in rather than competing.

Entrepreneurship Wisdom: From First-Time Founder

Cherian shares hard-won wisdom for aspiring entrepreneurs, particularly first-time founders:

Solve Deep Societal Problems: "Do not build a company just for the sake of making a lot of money and for fame and for power. As a first-time founder, typically you should look into a problem which is a deep societal problem, and once you create a solution for it, it enables human flourishing."

Why This Matters: "If your startup is enabling human flourishing, you can wake up every day and work hard regardless of whether it's a good day or a bad day. You can also hire the right people because they also want to work on a mission which is enabling human flourishing. There are also investors to fund because you align with their capital allocation."

Join an Accelerator: "I highly recommend joining an accelerator program. For me I went through Startups, which really helped me. They have mentors and managing directors who were basically founders before, they have a lot of experience. They really help you understand how the game works, help you with the external, internal drivers for your business."

Bringing Order to Chaos: Systems and Culture

Cherian emphasizes the importance of systems: "There are a lot of variables in problems that you're solving, and you need to bring order to the chaos because you can scale order but you cannot scale chaos. How do you do this? You do this by setting up systems that can measure your unit economics and building metrics to scale your business."

This applies especially to complex problems like cross-border recruitment with regulatory and cross-border complexities. "How do I bring order to this chaos? You cannot scale chaos, you can scale order."

On culture: "Finally I would say culture is key. If the CEO is not intentional about the culture, automatically there will be a culture which is formed, and it may not be the culture which you as a CEO wanted. From the start itself, it's really important to build a culture where the CEO's job is not to operate the business but to ensure that your team members are empowered with the resources and also solving their biggest challenges because they are the ones who are basically building the business."

The Bottom Line: Transforming Global Labor Mobility

HUNTR represents a new generation of platforms tackling one of the world's most complex and impactful problems: how 300 million migrant workers cross borders annually for employment, often through exploitative, inefficient systems. By bringing technology, transparency, and data to cross-border blue-collar recruitment, the company is creating a future where migrant workers can access safe employment without exploitation.

The three-sided marketplace architecture, combined with AI-powered documentation automation and demand forecasting, gives HUNTR multiple moats: regulatory expertise encoded in software, proprietary data from marketplace operations, and network effects from ecosystem partners.

Perhaps most importantly, Cherian's philosophy of "enabling human flourishing" as the North Star for startup building offers a template for founders tackling difficult problems. When you succeed at solving deep societal problems, you build not just a company but a movement—one that attracts talent, capital, and customers aligned with your mission.

As infrastructure investment accelerates across the Middle East and demand for blue-collar workforce grows, platforms like HUNTR that can provide transparent, efficient, large-scale recruitment will become not just advantageous but essential to the global economy.

Samuel Joy Cherian is the Co-founder of HUNTR, an AI-driven three-sided marketplace for cross-border blue-collar recruitment. Previously, he led digital transformation for Emirates Group's manpower division, managing 86,000+ migrant workers across aviation and multiple sectors. Originally from Trivandrum, India, he studied at VIT Tamil Nadu and has been based in Dubai for 10 years. He went through the Startups accelerator program.