For years, recruiters used machine learning to find potential hires by searching for keywords in résumés and LinkedIn profiles. Although this method helps to narrow the candidate pool, recruiters still have to manually review each profile to determine the best fit for the job.

David Paffenholz (pictured left) and Ishan Gupta, then just 22 and 19, respectively, realized that LLMs could find talent faster and more efficiently. They built Juicebox, an AI-powered search engine that uses natural language to analyze professional profiles, personal websites, and other publicly available information to identify the most qualified candidates.

After attending startup accelerator Y Combinator in the summer of 2022, Paffenholz and Gupta spent a couple more years refining their product. When their AI search engine, PeopleGPT, was ready in late 2023, it was quickly adopted by a wide range of customers, from small startups to large companies like Cognition, Ramp, and Perplexity.

In a short period of time, it was serving over 2,500 customers and achieving more than $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

On Thursday, Juicebox announced that it had raised $36 million in total funding, including a $30 million Series A round led by Sequoia.

Sequoia partner David Cahn learned about the company while catching up with an early-stage startup founder who said that he is using Juicebox for all of his recruiting efforts. Cahn told TechCrunch that the founder has hired over a dozen people without using a professional recruiter, something that was previously very difficult to do.

Such a rave review of Juicebox piqued Cahn’s interest. Shortly after, Cahn learned that Sequoia’s internal recruiter was also trying Juicebox to help the firm with its own hiring efforts, which made him even more excited about the startup’s growth potential.  

When Cahn eventually met with Paffenholz and Gupta, he was even more impressed.

“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,” Cahn told TechCrunch.

Although Juicebox has since hired eight additional employees, the company continues to attract customers without a sales team.

Customers are flocking to Juicebox in part because hiring speed is extremely important for companies racing to build AI functionalities.

What sets Juicebox’s search engine apart is its ability to infer information about candidates much like a human would.

“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 the regular searches,” Paffenholz told TechCrunch.

The startup’s product is popular not only with small companies that lack a dedicated recruiter, but also with talent teams at large corporations. By automating the candidate search, the tool frees up internal recruiters to focus more on building relationships with potential hires.

Once Juicebox identifies candidates, its agent can automatically email them and schedule initial calls.

While Juicebox is growing quickly, older talent acquisition startups like Eightfold are also adding AI-powered search functionality to their offerings.

Still, Cahn is convinced that Paffenholz and Gupta can transform Juicebox into an essential product for every startup’s technology stack.

“We’ve invested in a number of businesses that become defaults for startups, like Stripe,” he said. “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.”