Juicebox secures $30m to grow AI-powered recruitment tool PeopleGPT

Juicebox, the start-up building an AI-powered search engine for hiring, has raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital. The deal marks a major endorsement for a two-year-old company that has already won thousands of customers with its product, PeopleGPT.

The round, announced on Thursday, brings Juicebox’s total funding to $36 million, according to TechCrunch. The San Francisco-based company said it would use the fresh capital to expand engineering and product development as it aims to become a default recruitment tool for fast-growing technology firms.

Founded by David Paffenholz and Ishan Gupta, who were 22 and 19 respectively when they started the business, Juicebox uses large language models to identify candidates across professional profiles, personal websites and other publicly available sources.

The Wall Street Journal noted that unlike older systems, which rely on keyword matches, Juicebox’s engine infers details much like a human recruiter, helping to uncover candidates who might otherwise be overlooked.

Paffenholz said the technology “helps 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 in regular searches.”

Juicebox passed through Y Combinator in the summer of 2022 and spent the following year refining its technology. By late 2023, its PeopleGPT engine was ready for market. Within months, it was adopted by more than 2,500 customers, ranging from small start-ups to larger companies such as Cognition, Ramp and Perplexity.

TechCrunch reported that the company surpassed $10 million in annual recurring revenue in its first year on the market, an unusually fast trajectory for a start-up of its size.

Sequoia partner David Cahn said he first heard about the product through founders who were using it exclusively for recruitment. One told him he had hired more than a dozen people without employing a professional recruiter — a process that was previously difficult to achieve.

Cahn later learned Sequoia’s own internal recruiting team had started testing Juicebox. “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,” he said.

Sequoia’s investment reflects rising investor interest in AI-driven productivity tools. Cahn compared Juicebox’s potential to infrastructure players such as Stripe, which became default components in start-up technology stacks. “I think Juicebox has a chance to be a default where every single start-up, the first thing they use to hire their first employees, is Juicebox,” he said.

The company has since grown to around a dozen employees but still lacks a formal sales team, relying instead on word of mouth and customer referrals. The pace of adoption is driven by demand from companies racing to staff AI-focused projects, where speed in hiring can confer a competitive edge.