A Manual Process Got Uomma Off the Ground. An AI Platform Is Taking It to Scale.

The Opportunity

Canadian Businesses Want Skilled Help. The Hiring System Cannot Deliver It Fast Enough.

Canadian businesses lose time and money on hiring before a single qualified candidate reaches the interview stage. Job boards return volume without fit. Recruiters charge for slow searches. Freelance platforms cater to short gigs, not the long-term operational support most founders and SMBs actually need.

At the same time, skilled BIPOC professionals across North America and beyond struggle to access the Canadian market. Their experience gets discounted. Their applications go unseen. The talent exists. The infrastructure to match it does not.

Sara Awatta saw this from both sides. As a consultant, she heard Canadian employers describe the same hiring frustration over and over. She also saw the depth of skilled BIPOC talent ready to work, blocked by hiring systems that had no way to recognise them. Uomma was built to close that gap.

The Thesis

A Long-Term Partnership Model, Not a Gig Marketplace.

Odio Foundry took on Uomma because the unit economics worked from day one. Canadian businesses needed reliable, vetted talent. BIPOC professionals needed access to that market. Favourable exchange rates made it affordable on both sides. The match was there. What was missing was the system to make it repeatable.

Three things had to be true for Uomma to scale beyond a service business. Vetting had to be rigorous enough that businesses trusted the match without burning a week on interviews themselves. The platform had to support long-term partnerships rather than transactional gigs, because that is where retention and margin live. And the operating model had to handle volume without the founder personally screening every candidate.

The first two were proven through the manual operation. The third is what the venture is building now.

"We are not trying to be the cheapest job board. We are building the trusted way for Canadian businesses to hire skilled BIPOC talent for the long term. That changes what the platform has to do." — Sara Awatta, Founder, Uomma

How We Are Building It

Keep the Service Running. Build the Platform That Replaces It.

Uomma is operating today. Sara and the team run a manual pipeline: job description creation, personality assessment, resume and video pitch reviews, live interviews, training, matching, and feedback. The pipeline works. It also caps the business at whatever Sara and a handful of operators can personally process.

Odio Foundry's role is to keep that service running while building the platform that takes the manual work out of it. All three labs are active.

• Odio Digital — Brand & growth: brand bible, growth plan, website revamp, social and video content strategy, onboarding digitisation.
• Odio Tech — AI platform build: MVP for AI-driven candidate screening, interview workflow, client-side matching interface.
• Odio Ops — Operational scaling: client and EA onboarding systems, pricing analysis, infrastructure for growing talent pool.

The AI Platform

Scoped, Greenlit, In Build.

The MVP was scoped with Odio Tech in May. AI-driven candidate screening focused on interpersonal skills, with one to two job-specific questions. Automated reports generated for every candidate. A 70 percent cutoff score, with candidates below the threshold redirected to one to two months of training before reapplying. Interviews remain off-platform initially, with results uploaded back. Clients see pre-screened candidates aligned to their job requirements and submit match requests directly.

Target MVP go-live is June. A previous attempt to solve the same problem with a third-party tool failed a Canadian security audit and could not be customised to the workflow. Building it inside Odio Tech removes both constraints.

The Service Taxonomy

From One Role to Twelve.

Uomma started with Executive Assistants. The platform supports twelve specialised roles across industries: Executive, Administrative, Bookkeeping, Marketing, Social Media, Sales, HR, e-Commerce, Customer Support, Real Estate, Legal, and Medical Office. Each role is positioned as a strategic partner, not support staff. The brand language reflects that: assistants who think tactically, anticipate needs, and drive measurable outcomes.

The Brand and Growth Engine

Odio Digital is running a full brand bible, growth plan, and website revamp in parallel with the platform build. Voice and visual direction are being tuned for Canadian, Nigerian, and wider diaspora audiences. A three-month growth plan covers content pillars, social direction, video content strategy, and onboarding digitisation. The goal is for the brand and the platform to launch together, with inbound demand ready when the system can absorb it.

Key Milestones

Where It Stands