Summary:
Juicebox raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia, totaling $36 million, to enhance its AI-powered hiring search engine.
Founded by young entrepreneurs David Paffenholz and Ishan Gupta, the startup uses LLMs to analyze public data and find candidates more efficiently than keyword-based methods.
The platform has gained over 2,500 customers, including major firms like Perplexity and Ramp, and achieved over $10 million in ARR with minimal staff.
Juicebox's technology infers candidate qualities like a human, identifying talent that traditional searches miss, and automates outreach to speed up hiring.
Sequoia's David Cahn sees Juicebox becoming a default tool for startups, comparable to Stripe, due to its rapid adoption and impact on recruitment.
For years, recruiters have relied on machine learning to find potential hires by scanning for keywords in résumés and LinkedIn profiles. While this approach helps narrow down the candidate pool, it still requires recruiters to manually review each profile to assess the best fit for a job.
David Paffenholz and Ishan Gupta, who were just 22 and 19 years old at the time, recognized that large language models (LLMs) could revolutionize this process by finding talent more quickly and efficiently. They developed Juicebox, an AI-powered search engine that uses natural language processing to analyze professional profiles, personal websites, and other publicly available data to pinpoint the most qualified candidates.
After participating in the Y Combinator startup accelerator in the summer of 2022, Paffenholz and Gupta spent additional years refining their product. By late 2023, their AI search engine, initially called PeopleGPT, was launched and rapidly adopted by a diverse range of customers, from small startups to major companies like Cognition, Ramp, and Perplexity.
In a remarkably short time, Juicebox grew to serve over 2,500 customers and achieved more than $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Recently, Juicebox announced a total funding of $36 million, including a $30 million Series A round led by Sequoia.
David Cahn, a partner at Sequoia, discovered the company through an early-stage startup founder who praised Juicebox for enabling him to hire over a dozen people without a professional recruiter—a task that was previously very challenging. This positive feedback sparked Cahn's interest, which grew when he learned that Sequoia's internal recruiter was also testing Juicebox for the firm's hiring needs.
When Cahn met with Paffenholz and Gupta, he was highly impressed, noting, "I’m not sure I’ve ever in my career seen a company with four people that got to 2,000 customers with that small of a team." Although Juicebox has since expanded to 12 employees, it continues to attract customers without a dedicated sales team.
Customers are drawn to Juicebox partly because hiring speed is critical for companies racing to integrate AI functionalities. What distinguishes Juicebox's search engine is its ability to infer candidate information in a human-like manner.
"We help find net new candidates that wouldn’t be found elsewhere, because the profiles might not have the keywords or the types of things that we’d expect them to have in regular searches," Paffenholz explained.
The product is popular not only with small companies lacking dedicated recruiters but also with talent teams at large corporations. By automating candidate searches, the tool allows internal recruiters to focus more on building relationships with potential hires. Once candidates are identified, Juicebox's agent can automatically email them and schedule initial calls.
While established talent acquisition startups like Eightfold are also incorporating AI-powered search features, Cahn believes Juicebox has the potential to become a default tool in every startup's technology stack, similar to Stripe.
"I think Juicebox has a chance to be a default where, every single startup, [it’s] the first thing they use to hire their first employees," he said.
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