When people think of outsourcing they generally imagine manufacturing or call centers taking place somewhere far away. However, some startups are tapping into more highly educated workforces overseas.
Tiandi Energy locates people with advanced geotechnical knowledge from China, bringing them into the lucrative -- but understaffed -- Western oil and gas industry.
As technical jobs markets continue to boom in the United States and other affluent countries, similar staffing gaps are likely to develop in quite a few more industries, so we may well see more companies like Tiandi popping up.
The $2.5 million funding, the company's first, was provided by Trident Capital and Mustang Ventures. Tiandi is a spin-off of an oil firm called IHS, and is located in Palo Alto.