Job Today, a Luxembourg-based startup with an app to help people find casual jobs, launches in Germany and announces $35M round
Job Today cofounders Polina Montano (left) and Eugene Mizin (right). — Job Today, a Luxembourg startup with an app that aims to help people find casual jobs quickly …
Context & Ripple Effects
Job Today's German entry is funded by the media-for-equity deal with RTL and other broadcasters announced alongside its $35M round — meaning the startup pays for growth with equity rather than ad budget, and gets broadcast promotion in the market it is entering. The cofounders, Eugene Mizin and Polina Montano, are betting that speed-to-hire for casual work travels across borders from Luxembourg.
Germany is the proving ground: Berlin's Zenjob had already raised a $30M Series C led by Forestay Capital to expand throughout the country, so Job Today lands in a segment where local players are well capitalized rather than vacant.
First-order effects
- RTL and the other media partners swap airtime for equity, becoming Job Today's primary user-acquisition channel in Germany while carrying valuation risk on a pre-scale marketplace.
- German casual-work platforms, most directly Zenjob, now face a broadcast-backed rival whose customer acquisition cost is structurally subsidized by its investors' media inventory.
Second-order effects
- Zenjob's response path is visible in its own arc — it kept raising, reaching a $50M Series D led by Aragon by 2022 — suggesting media-funded entrants push incumbents toward larger war chests and deeper employer-side supply.
- Other European broadcasters watching the RTL deal gain a template for deploying unsold inventory into startup cap tables, turning media groups into recurring marketplace investors.
Third-order effects
- If media-for-equity keeps funding consumer marketplaces, Europe's hiring apps consolidate around whoever pairs cheap distribution with liquidity on both sides of the match — capital structure, not product features, becomes the moat.
- Casual and side work in Germany trends toward app-based instant matching, squeezing traditional temp agencies whose value was precisely the speed and locality these apps commoditize.
The trend: European consumer marketplaces are increasingly financed by broadcaster media-for-equity deals that convert advertising inventory into equity stakes, accelerating cross-border land grabs in labor matching.