Tezi.ai an innovative startup, has raised $9 million in seed funding, led by 8VC and Audacious Ventures, to advance its autonomous AI agent for recruitment, named Max. This AI agent is designed to streamline the end-to-end hiring process, including sourcing, screening, and scheduling, while interacting seamlessly with users on platforms like Slack. Tezi's approach aims to significantly reduce hiring costs and ramp-up time, provide consistent candidate experiences, and minimize bias in hiring decisions. Co-founders Raghavendra Prabhu and Jason James, with extensive experience in tech and recruitment, are driving this initiative to transform how companies hire talent.

 

Seed funding led by 8VC and Audacious Ventures

It’s a big day for us at Tezi! We’ve raised $9M in seed funding led by 8VC and Audacious Ventures, with support from Liquid 2, Afore, Prime Set, and South Park Commons. Angel investors in the round include the founding CEOs of Instacart and Thumbtack.

The best companies are built by the best teams, which require the best recruiters working behind the scenes. Traditionally, companies need to hire teams of recruiters when business is good, a high-commitment and inflexible solution that often leads to layoffs when hiring slows, or hire an agency, where incentives are often misaligned. Both options can be prohibitively expensive. On average, companies in the US spend $4,700 per hire, with costs skyrocketing to $20,000-$40,000 for STEM positions. In addition to cost, hiring can be slow to bootstrap, often taking weeks to get an agency or recruiter in place, and the quality can be hit or miss.

That is, until now. Max is the first autonomous AI employee trained by top hiring managers and recruiters to lead the end-to-end recruiting process, including:

• Sourcing with natural language search, 750M candidate profiles globally, deep calibration, and personalized emails


• Screening to rank inbound applications, decision them, and assess & sell the best applicants.


• Scheduling that gracefully handles complex interview plans, last-minute reschedules, and interviewer bandwidth challenges.

Max uses natural language that you can interact with where you already work, on Slack, or the web. Just like a helpful coworker, it can nudge you and answer your follow-up questions. Setup the role once and Max does all the work autonomously, keeping you informed along the way, and interviews start to appear on your calendar within days.

Companies relying on Max see the following benefits:

• Ramp-up time with AI is reduced from weeks to minutes, which speeds up the time-to-hire dramatically and delivers business impact faster.


• Consistent and high quality candidate experience with AI. Max is available to chat with candidates at any time of their choosing, responds instantaneously, and never drops the ball.


• Lower costs associated with AI recruitment allow businesses to reinvest more funds into R&D, Sales, and Marketing.


• With AI’s flexible capacity, hiring can scale up or down instantly, meeting the needs of the business or market cycles.


• Reduced bias and higher consistency in decisioning aided by an expertly trained AI.

Tezi allows your employees to focus on more strategic recruiting activities that require a human touch, like evaluating candidates, selling them on the role, and closing the hire. Over time, Max will continue to gain more capabilities and streamline more of the workflow of recruiting including interviewing assistance, processing offers and seamlessly transitioning hires to onboarding.

Under the covers, Max uses agentic AI technology powered by dozens of specialized agents, each trained to do one recruiting task very well, seamlessly orchestrated to deliver the experience of interacting with one AI recruiter.

I met my cofounder, Jason James, while at Thumbtack where I was CTO and he was VP of Product and Design. We’ve each been in management and executive roles for over a decade across premier technology companies, between us having hired over 500 people. We became intimately familiar with building out teams, as well as the many obstacles that come with finding and hiring the right people and knew we had to find a better solution.

While we’re still in our early days, tech companies are already seeing the power of what’s possible with Tezi. Whether it is a small company, strapped for time and looking to have Max run all their open roles, or a larger company looking to drive efficiency by augmenting capacity to an existing recruiting team, Max can be a great option. With Tezi, recruiting capacity will never be a bottleneck to hiring as fast as the company desires. Democratizing access to a high-quality recruiting partner for every hiring manager around the globe levels the playing field in finding and recruiting excellent talent.

And finally, here’s what our investors had to say about our news:

“Talent and recruiting have remained the dark arts of the enterprise: a near-infinite market that has not seen any true technological advancement in a generation. Even with the inflection in AI, attacking this gap is not for the faint of heart. It requires an exceptional founding team, not just technically, but in all the complexities and nuances of the domain. At 8VC, we are exhilarated to have found such a team in Tezi. RVP (who I failed to recruit many times in a past life, but became a friend!) and Jason have each spent 22 years perfecting their craft, together hiring 500+ world-class talents in engineering, product and design. We look forward to RVP and Jason transforming this space with their trademark virtuosity.”

– Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner, 8VC

“Recruiting A+ talent has always been one of the most important imperatives at the best-in-class companies. But before Tezi, software efforts in recruiting have been to provide tooling to make recruiters marginally more efficient. Tezi is the first recruiting AI agent that autonomously runs the recruiting workflow end to end, from sourcing the *best* talent out there, to screening applicants and scheduling interviews, with a friction-free process leading to a high quality candidate experience. Tezi makes recruiting a strategic edge for its customers. That's huge!"

– Nakul Mandan, Founder & Partner, Audacious Ventures

If you’re excited about what we’re building, interested in learning more, or want to try out Max at your company, visit tezi.ai.