Prime Highlights:
- Juicebox secured $30 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital, bringing its total funding to $36 million.
- The startup uses AI-driven platform PeopleGPT to automate candidate discovery and outreach, helping companies find top talent efficiently.
Key Facts:
- Founded by David Paffenholz (22) and Ishan Gupta (19), Juicebox has over 2,500 buyers, $10 million in annual recurring revenue, and only 12 employees.
- The platform uses large language models to analyze professional profiles, personal websites, and public data, detecting talent that traditional keyword searches may miss.
Background
Juicebox, an AI-based hiring startup, announced it has raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital, bringing its total funding to $36 million. The platform operates on large language models (LLMs) to assist companies with finding and reaching top talent effectively.
Juicebox was founded by David Paffenholz (22) and Ishan Gupta (19) and was a result of Y Combinator in 2022. Its product, PeopleGPT, uses professional profiles, personal websites, and publicly available data to find qualified candidates. The tool also automates contacting, where candidates are emailed and initial calls are made.
With only 12 employees Juicebox rapidly spread, with over 2,500 buyers and over $10 million in annual recurring revenues. Large companies and startups alike use the platform, including Cognition, Ramp, and Perplexity.
Sequoia partner David Cahn said the startup’s rapid adoption impressed him. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a company with four people that got to 2,000 customers,” he told TechCrunch. He believes Juicebox could become a default hiring tool for startups, similar to Stripe for payments.
The difference in Juicebox is that it can deduce details about the candidate, just as a human being would, detecting talent that a simple keyword search could not recognize. The system automates the process of candidate discovery, enabling internal recruiters to devote more time to building relationships instead of searching.
As the older talent platforms start competing with AI functions, Juicebox has a chance to grow rapidly and become a significant tool that startups need to create their teams rapidly and particularly in the rapidly changing AI sphere.