Business
From Stripe to start-up: Talexa targets costly HR blind spots
DCM Editorial Summary: This story has been independently rewritten and summarised for DCM readers to highlight key developments relevant to the region. Original reporting by Irish Times, click this post to read the original article.
Phuong Vu has almost a decade’s experience of building and scaling global teams, most recently at Stripe. Her remit covered global talent acquisition and research as well as workforce data and strategy, and she had become acutely aware of the HR challenges faced by organisations as they grow and scale.
What Vu saw repeatedly was that while the concept of having a workforce hired for its skills is widely understood and accepted, there’s a gap when it comes to execution. Put simply, most organisations don’t have a clear picture of the skills they already have or the skills they need. As a result, they often make poor and costly hiring decisions.
In May last year, Vu left Stripe to address this problem and has since developed Talexa, a workforce intelligence platform that provides organisations with accurate visibility of their existing skills and capabilities, helping them build and implement HR strategies that blend the best of human capabilities and AI.
“Working in the talent space for over nine years (with Stripe and international recruitment company, CPL, before that) I interviewed thousands of people from employees to senior executives across global enterprises,” Vu says.
“The same concerns surfaced repeatedly: a lack of visibility into workforce skills, top talent being underutilised, limited career development opportunities, persistent skills gaps despite money being wasted on misdirected learning and development and cycles of over-hiring and lay-offs. Poor AI adoption was also a problem, as was failure to implement change and transformation.
“Skills-based organisations have been around for years, yet most companies still struggle to adopt the model in practise due to its complexity, inconsistent data, and lack of a clear starting point. More importantly, many organisations find it difficult to connect workforce data to real decisions.
“They need to understand what skills they have now, which roles need to change, where capability gaps exist, and where AI can responsibly improve productivity. This challenge has become critical in an era of rapid AI adoption and workforce disruption, where skills, roles, and capacity must be planned far more dynamically than before.
“Talexa was built not only to solve this problem, but to help organisations build a modern people infrastructure that can keep pace with rapid business and technology change, including the responsible adoption of AI.”
She says Talexa is particularly relevant for organisations that recognise the need to move towards a skills-based approach but struggle to adopt it. “We also work with organisations undergoing workforce transformation or disruption, helping them plan more effectively by using skills data as the foundation for decision-making.”
Vu says that most existing tools are limited to skills mapping, static role profiles and HR reporting, whereas Talexa focuses on human capability in actual business and commercial contexts. In particular, it can hone in on the real work being done, the capabilities this requires, and which aspects of human capability can be AI-assisted at different levels.
“This enables organisations to move from AI curiosity to targeted pilots, specific roles, specific work, and measurable impact, with governance in mind,” Vu says. “It also gives executives a trusted foundation of skills intelligence to make workforce decisions that drive real business outcomes, not just activity.”
Vu is originally from Vietnam and majored in maths and IT before moving to Ireland in 2013 to study for a degree in business and management. She also has a master’s in talent, leadership and HR strategy from DCU and a higher diploma in software development.
Vu has carried out much of the platform development herself – with some outside help – on a shoestring budget of about €8,000, plus the €15,000 stipend that goes with participation in the New Frontiers start-up programme. She is currently on phase three of the programme at TU Tallaght.
“New Frontiers provided the runway and structure needed to turn early chaos into a business, while keeping us accountable and constantly pushing us to take the next step,” she says.
While Vu has been able to accelerate the development of the business by being intensely focused and working seven days a week with no salary, Talexa has now reached the point where it needs more substantial investment. In has recently been approved for pre-seed funding of €100,000 by Enterprise Ireland.
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The platform, which has been in beta with a pilot group since last September, is now live. Talexa’s sweet spot is organisations with 500-plus employees. However, the company also has a separate package for small businesses that don’t yet have an employee planning/management system or the capability or knowledge required to implement AI effectively.
The company’s main revenue model is subscription-based, with a charge of between €5 and €15 per employee per month, depending on volume. An onboarding fee may also apply, depending on the level of integration required.
Talexa will focus on the Irish and UK markets to start with, and its ideal users will be progressive organisations where workforce transformation and AI adoption are priorities.
Supporting the company’s delivery of skills identification, workforce planning and management is an in-house research unit which conducts its own analysis of sectors, services, products and industries to ensure that companies are hiring and plugging skills gaps for future trends, not just for their immediate needs.
“What really differentiates Talexa is our focus on commercial execution. We link skills and capability data directly to real business outcomes, enabling leaders to make decisions that drive measurable impact rather than static reporting,” Vu says.
“The hardest part of setting up has been balancing speed with trust while also educating the market. We’re building something very ambitious with long-term value in a space where decisions are sensitive (because of the interplay of people, jobs and AI), while ensuring the product is practical, credible, and delivers value quickly.”
