From Budapest to Bucharest: Giggle Scales the Future of Flexible Work in CEE

• Giggle is a Hungarian gig economy startup, aimed for the hospitality and blue-collar work
• The platform scaled rapidly with strong enterprise adoption and EUR5M+ of transactions in 2025
• With the new investment, Giggle aims to unlock Romania, a larger, underpenetrated labor market with high informal workforce
• The company targets growing to 1 million workers by 2027

This February, the Budapest-based blue-collar gig economy platform Giggle announced entering the Romanian market. To support this expansion, the startup secured an additional investment round from OXO Labs (part of O3 Partners, headed by Peter Oszkó, former Hungarian Minister of Finance), SmartWare.tech, and a company of business angels, including Dániel Prekopcsák of PD Holding and Tamas Siklosi of PICS Telecom International.

Founders’ Journey, Early Pivot, Rapid Growth, and Enterprise Validation

Giggle’s co-founders Ádám Sebestyén and Ádám Birizdó left their established careers to build their platform in 2022. Originally, Giggle started as a SaaS solution for hotel management.

‘The pivot came organically, from listening. When we heard for the fifth time from a potential customer “we don’t need your software, but do you have any staff you could send our way?” — we knew we were solving the wrong problem. The market literally told us exactly what it needed, and we followed,’ Mr Sebestyén recalls.

Since its launch, Giggle has grown to 180,000 registered workers; the platform processed EUR 5M+ in transactions in 2025 alone, with major clients like JYSK, Rossmann, and Marriott on board. Landing anchor enterprise clients — large corporates operating vast warehouse networks or major hospitality infrastructure — was a key early milestone, proving Giggle could reliably solve sizable and urgent staffing gaps.

As for the investor journey, it began with the Hungarian Business Angel Network. Then the team went on to Shark Tank Hungary, which led to the recent funding round.

‘The biggest ongoing challenge is pace — expanding the supply of workers and the network of clients in parallel, especially as we enter new markets,’ Mr Birizdó admits.

A Data-Driven Liquidity Engine and a Quality Flywheel

According to the founder, Giggle’s moat is structural liquidity as every shift posted on Giggle receives an average of 8 applicants, with the first application arriving within 50 minutes. The platform continuously analyzes seasonal and partner-specific data to forecast peak periods, monitors fill rates in real time, and proactively intervenes when gaps become apparent.

‘As shift volume grows, so does our registered worker base, creating a self-reinforcing cycle that makes the platform more reliable with scale. Traditional agencies can’t match that speed or data-driven precision, and global gig platforms aren’t built for the blue-collar, shift-based segment we serve. On top of that, we provide fully administered employment — tax compliance, documented income, and legal support,’ Mr Sebestyén adds.

Further, the more data Giggle gathers about worker behavior, the more precisely it can match supply and demand. The platform tracks reliability metrics — show-up rates, employer ratings, repeat bookings — which means the best workers naturally surface for the best shifts.

‘This creates an incentive loop: workers who perform well get access to more and better opportunities, and employers get increasingly reliable staff over time. It’s a quality flywheel built into the product,’ Mr Birizdó explains.

Retention Through Flexibility and Value Creation

Giggle’s own worker survey data points at more than 70% of our workers’ main objective being to keep working in a flexible manner, either to supplement or completely replace their full-time employment. These workers are choosing flexibility, not filling a gap out of desperation.

‘On the employer side, when we proved to a handful of anchor clients that Giggle could reliably solve their staffing problem, they didn’t just stay — they became our best case studies and, in many ways, our best salespeople. The key to retention on both sides is delivering consistent value: reliable staff for employers, reliable income for workers,’ Mr Sebestyén shares.

Speaking of anchor clients, targeting key accounts was one of Giggle’s most important early decisions. As it became apparent, large corporates face a staffing problem that never really goes away — no-shows, unreliable workers, last-minute gaps — and when Giggle proved they could solve it, they quickly gained loyal long-term partners. That said, the co-founders assure that their works just as well for mid-size and smaller businesses.

‘As we scale, the client base diversifies naturally. The structural liquidity we build with large accounts benefits every employer on the platform,’ the Giggle founding team believes.

Why Romania?

What made Romania particularly attractive for Giggles expansion is its significant volume of labor force, one of the largest in Central and Eastern Europe with nearly 9 million economically active people. When looking into this market, the Giggle team was struck by how much of that potential was locked out of the formal flexible economy. The gig economy layer was almost entirely untapped. The team also found out that Romania has a significantly larger informal labor market than Hungary, meaning a greater share of workers have never had access to structured, documented flexible work, forming a larger addressable market Giggle. In other words, the fundamentals that made Giggle work in Hungary apply in Romania, at a greater scale.

Notably, Giggle provides fully administered employment in every market — meaning tax compliance, documented income, and legal support are built into the platform from day one. While restraining from working in grey areas implies more upfront investment in legal and operational infrastructure per market, it makes the platform trustworthy for both workers and enterprise clients.

Investor Confidence

OXO Labs is strongly convinced that, amidst the current economic and geopolitical uncertainties, solutions providing flexible responses to labor market challenges are gaining real value. Looking at how Giggle has already demonstrated significant growth and proven it can create real-time labor market liquidity, OXO Labs sees great opportunity in supporting its further expansion both domestically and regionally.

‘We continuously look for teams that address structural challenges in the economy with scalable, technology-driven solutions. Giggle stood out to us because it directly addresses one of the most pressing issues in today’s labour market: the growing mismatch between supply and demand, as well as the increasing need for flexibility on both sides. We particularly value the team’s strong execution capabilities, their deep understanding of employer needs — especially in sectors such as retail, logistics, and hospitality — as well as their vision for regional expansion. We believe Giggle is well positioned to become a key player in the transformation of the future of work in the region,’ the investors tell ITKeyMedia.

Scaling Ambition and Vision for the Future of Work

The funding will help Giggle strengthen its presence in both Hungary and Romania while building the operational and data infrastructure to scale further. This implies growing the platform’s registered worker base and enterprise client portfolio in Romania to match Giggle’s penetration in Hungary. The startup will also invest in the forecasting and matching algorithms that are central to the platform’s reliability, and prepare the playbook — legal, operational, and commercial — for further regional expansion.

The ambition is to support 1 million workers in finding employment and to fill tens of thousands of shifts monthly by the end of 2027. To achieve this, Giggle will have to prioritize market education and help businesses understand that full-time headcount isn’t the only answer to their operational needs — that it’s possible to weave a reliable, on-demand workforce into their day-to-day operations without sacrificing quality, which is already happening in Hungary, with Giggle’s support.

‘We believe the shift toward flexible work is structural, not cyclical. AI will actually expand our market — as it frees up white-collar capacity, spending in e-commerce, travel, hospitality, and entertainment will grow, and those industries need human hands for fulfillment, service, and experience delivery. Gig platforms like Giggle are going to be the operational backbone of that growth. As for specific markets, we’re focused on executing well in Hungary and Romania first, but the Central and Eastern European region is full of markets with similar dynamics — large workforces, underdeveloped flexible work infrastructure, and growing demand,’ Mr Birizdó concludes.

Giggle’s expansion into Romania underscores a broader shift in how labor markets across the CEE are evolving toward structured, flexible employment models. By formalizing gig work with compliance, data-driven matching, and enterprise-grade reliability, the platform addresses immediate staffing shortages and unlocks a largely untapped workforce segment. Giggle’s model is poised to become a blueprint for modernizing fragmented labor markets across the region while redefining how businesses and workers engage with flexible work.