Georgia’s youth unemployment rate has sat around 25 to 27 percent for years, even as businesses across hospitality and retail struggle to staff shifts. Herio, a flexible-work platform built in Tbilisi, thinks that contradiction is the whole story. We sat down with the company’s co-founder and COO, Gegi Gvazava, to talk about why the labor market itself is the problem and how a completed shift can matter more than a CV.
Herio’s pitch sounds simple on the surface: connect businesses that need short-term, flexible staff with people who want to work on their own terms. Underneath it is a bet that the entire architecture of hiring, built for full-time, fixed-schedule employment, no longer matches how a generation of workers or a fast-moving business actually operates.
The company has already signed partnerships with Zara, Red Bull, Sinsay and SPAR, alongside Georgian retailers Agrohub and Europroduct, passed 20,000 users, and is growing revenue 27 percent month over month without touching outside capital. Now it’s preparing to raise its next round and take the model beyond Georgia’s borders.
Take us back to the beginning. What was the moment that made you think “This needs to exist”?
Back at university, we wanted flexible, short-term work, but finding it was surprisingly difficult. There were plenty of traditional job platforms, but almost nothing built around the way students actually wanted to work.
Years later, after starting our own business in Georgia, we hit the same problem from the other side: we needed people for short-term and flexible jobs, and finding reliable workers was just as difficult.
That’s when it clicked. The problem wasn’t just on the job seeker side. The whole system was built for traditional employment, not flexible work. That’s where the idea for Herio came from.
If Herio succeeds completely in five years, what will be true of the Georgian labor market that isn’t true today?
I want Georgia to have one of the most flexible, modern labor markets in the region. Businesses will always need reliable people, but how they access and manage that workforce will be fundamentally different. The next generation doesn’t want to build their lives around rigid schedules, and businesses need to adapt to that.
We’re starting with hospitality and retail because that’s where the problem is most visible, but the ambition is bigger: shifting frontline hiring from fixed headcount to a flexible, on-demand workforce, and giving workers control over when they work, how much, and how much they earn.
Where does Georgia’s youth unemployment gap actually come from? Is it a jobs problem, a skills problem, or an access problem?
It’s a combination. The labor market itself hasn’t evolved fast enough; most hiring platforms were built around traditional employment while the expectations of the new generation have changed. Young people don’t necessarily want to work less, they want to work differently.
There’s also a mismatch between skills and opportunities, and a third problem of access: businesses struggle to reach the right people, and young people don’t have a simple way to discover opportunities. The real problem isn’t that young people don’t want to work. It’s that the system connecting their willingness and skills to real opportunities hasn’t evolved fast enough.
Employers say young people “lack experience.” Young people say they “can’t get experience without a job.” How does Herio break that loop?
A lot of entry-level work in hospitality, retail and events doesn’t require years of experience. You can learn the basics quickly and improve by doing the job.
The bigger opportunity is what happens with that experience afterward. We believe verified work experience is a stronger signal than a CV, which is often outdated and self-reported. With Herio, every completed shift becomes part of a verified track record: instead of saying “I don’t have experience,” a profile can show 10, 20 or 50 completed shifts and a strong rating. That creates a loop: first opportunity, verified experience, stronger reputation, better opportunities.
Critics argue gig platforms shift risk onto workers, with no benefits and no job security. How do you respond?
That criticism is valid if a platform simply pushes all the risk onto the worker. That’s not how we see Herio. We act as a third layer of trust between the worker and the business: the job is verified, payment is guaranteed, and workers can rate businesses and build their own reputation.
The trade-off with gig work is simple. You give up some of the stability of a full-time job, but you gain control over your time.
What’s next: expansion and the investment round?
We believe we’ve found product-market fit in Georgia. The next challenge isn’t proving the model works, it’s proving we can replicate it. We’re deliberately expanding city by city, into the Caucasus first, then larger markets across Central Asia and CEE.
Herio is preparing to open its next investment round, with discussions already underway with local and international investors. The round will fund the technology and infrastructure to scale and accelerate expansion market by market. The model is proven, the demand is proven, and now it’s about building the machine to scale it.
